Microsoft Looks At Other Search Engines

ZuperDee writes "It looks like Microsoft is now looking for another search engine to buy. They are looking at Ask Jeeves and Looksmart, but they recently dumped Looksmart, after deciding that its results don't stack up well. So would anyone be surprised if they bought Ask Jeeves? It can't hurt that according to Netcraft, they already run Microsoft IIS."

Comments

But does anyone use them?

[sahonen]

I don't know anyone who uses anything but Google anymore.

Re:But does anyone use them?

[BadCable]

There was also a time once when people said "But does anyone use anything but Netscape nowdays anyway?"

Re:But does anyone use them?

[BadCable]

But then google is also starting to suck. People are learning how to cheat their page ranking system, more and more "trap" sites exist which do nothing but link to a central site while also linking to each other. (For example, try finding jewlery sites - at least 30% of the responses will be fake sites that point to ONE site.) Sure Google isn't "dead" and it's not "dying" but it's certainly becoming more vulnerable to abuse and less accurate than it once was. With the millions that MS has to invest in an engine it's likley that they'll be able to provide just slighly better results than Google and use the "default page", "page not found" etc traps to promote their seach engine.

Re:But does anyone use them?

[digitalsushi]

I wonder why google doesnt parse the page for redirects, and drop the rank if the page does? You know, I bet that might be in the next version of google. I almost always search for 4 to 8 word strings, enclosed in quotation marks, and I've actually been landing on trap sites with those. That's scary! But their weakness is they all do a redirect. Why couldnt google preparse the pages to see if the text and background colors are the same, or close? Those pages should get dropped too. Google does rule, look through my post history to see how much I rant about them. But, they are getting worse, a little. But they can catch up.

Re:But does anyone use them?

[multimed]

Certainly more people have learned to cheat google but those guys aren't standing still either--they're very intelligent people who have remained committed to providing the best search results for their users. While there's no question the problem is a difficult one, they constantly try to foil those who cheat. The fact that they're committed to providing the best results, in addition to their Rule #1: "Don't be evil," has me convinced that if they can't continue to provide great results and thwart most of the cheaters, then no one can.

Re:But does anyone use them?

[aridhol]

Maybe they should follow redirects and index only the final page. This avoids indexing the intermediate pages that are there only for redirects, and also allows you to move your site somewhat more easily by adding a redirect to your current page.

As for the text/background idea, what about running the page through something similar to SpamAssassin. Not all tests are applicable for websites, but a new ruleset shouldn't be too hard for them to write.

Also, do they keep all pages for their cache, or just ones with a high enough PageRank? How difficult would it be for them to compare two pages for similarity, and lowering the rank for identical pages? Or for pages that have the exact same set of links (to reduce the effectiveness of link farms).

Due to the nature of the PageRank algorithm, lowering the score on the referring pages will have a result on the target page, while ensuring that it's difficult to get someone dropped completely (since other, high-ranking sites may also be pointing there).

Re:But does anyone use them?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know anyone who uses anything but Google anymore.

I was using Verisign's Sitefinder for a little bit there but all you guys bitched up a storm and they shut it down. Boo hoo. :-)

BS based on rumors

[melted]

Come on folks, RTFA. The article is just a bunch of rumors carefully worded to sound believable.

Re:BS based on rumors

[kawika]

If they are trying to read tea leaves, they focused on the wrong part of the story. MS doesn't need the best search engine. Many MSN subscribers will use the search engine they are given. They want a way to make MONEY off search engines. That's what an Overture exec brings, experience with how to do pay-per-click placements in a search engine.

This is particularly important now that Overture is a wholly owned part of Yahoo. It is also important because Overture has partnered with Gator (er, Claria) to pop Overture ads by snooping on users who are using other search engines like Google.

If you want to talk about scary, think what would happen if Microsoft put a Gator-like ad engine in Longhorn and tied it to their own home grown pay-per-click search engine. Come to think of it, every day at the computer would be like watching a Nascar race. All those pretty logos.

Tip to MS

[jazman_777]

Try this.

Jeeves

[Anonymous Coward]

Should Microsoft buy Ask Jeeves?

[answer]

Why not? No one else uses us.

Re:Jeeves

[altstadt]

Is it just me or does anybody else think that Jeeves is just a repackaged Eliza?

I have never had a useful search result from Jeeves. The results it gives are always part of some party game: guess how this result relates to your question.

Why buy, when you can build?

[Superfreaker]

I don't understand why they need to buy an engine. It may be shortsighted of me, but building one would probably cost less and could be done failry quickly.

I built a small one and there only seems to be two major components of a search engine service (yes I realize this is very simplistic). The spidering of content (done with sheer horespower) and an indexing and the search algorithm. Seems fairly straightforward to me. What I learned was that the algorithm and indexing was not the problem but the processing power needed to spider the entire net efficiently.

Re:Why buy, when you can build?

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

That's a good question. Why would MS purchase any company since they have the horsepower to build anything that they want?

I belive the answer lays more in "Who would MS be removing from the existing market?" MS seems more interested in elbowing their way to the table, whatever table that be, than they do in really creating something new. When they do this, they remove the competition and become the defacto leader. Where have we seen this behavior before?

That seems to be their strategy overall. Simply wait until a new technology starts to catch on, and after the first movers have failed, then swoop in and purchase up everything that's left, forcing their way to "innovator" status....who's gonna say that they are not?...all those companies have been assimilated.

I'm pleased that google rebuffed them.... I can't imagine MS doing better than Google. They can't under-cut Google on price either!....I think that the only avenue they have open is to force their own site as the default for IE. That would be another anti-trust violation, and easy for even dumb judges to spot as obvious.

Their options seem pretty limited now, purchase a second rate search engine or develop on their own. Either way, "it's going to be a long hard slog" as Donald Rumsfield would say.

Re:Why buy, when you can build?

[Xzzy]

> It may be shortsighted of me, but building one
> would probably cost less and could be done failry
> quickly.

Building one wouldn't remove a potential competitor though. ;)

If you can get a search engine AND make it easier to dominate the market, AND the price difference between the two is within reason.. why not just assimilate someone?

Re:Why buy, when you can build?

[herrvinny]

No way.

Yes, I agree that the two major components of a search engine are hardware and the algorithm, but hardware is the easy part, IMHO. Think about it. Google simply throws away broken hardware instead of trying to fix it, that's how cheap it is. And on balance, how much hardware do you really need? A cluster of supercheap computers doesn't sound like a tall order. They don't even have to be really, 100% reliable. With the dot com crash, there are tons of empty buildings designed to do nothing but hold vast racks of computers. There's a huge warehouse near me that was converted into a server farm warehouse, and now it sits empty. Get a few of those and fill them up. Spidering is easy. It's easy to build a program that does nothing except search for links, follow them, and save the pages to disk.

The algorithm, on the other hand, is tricky. Google really innovated by deciding to rank pages based on the number of links they get. Google, or someone else, probably has that idea patented up the wazoo. Someone really has to come up with a new idea for indexing sites. Perhaps we need to go back to a Yahoo! style directory service, where actual humans rate the content? Or maybe we need some sort of AI to handle indexing? Easier said than done. Even user-ratings services, such as TopSites(Got a spam from them earlier today) have problems in that someone could easily rig up a bot to go vote multiple times. Anyone want to put in an idea on how the next gen search engine should work?

Business Philosophy

[dlosey]

Most businesses in today's market are trying to retract into their core product. Microsoft is doing the opposite and trying to branch out into as many markets as possible(again). IMHO this may not be the best business approach for them.

Sometimes it is better to focus on one thing and make a killing at it. Instead they are making a little profit here, a little profit there.. I guess it keeps the government off your back for being an OS monopoly, though. But do they really think that is a problem as Apple and RedHat stock and market share keep rising?

Re:Ask Clippy

[JamesD_UK]

You appear to neeed a spellchecker. Would you like to

- Repeatedly hit head against wall
- Remember to preview before posting
- Log Off /.

Re:Why not ask Jeeves

[sosume]

According to this link, AskJeeves and Look Smart are the same company...
so is this a marketing hype to keep Google stocks cheap for a hostile takeover??

Microsoft COULD Make it Work!!!!

[ZuperDee]

I think I should also point out that Ask Jeeves also own Teoma, which is absolutely nothing to be sneezed at.

Not only that, but Microsoft has a world-class research arm with Microsoft Research. With Microsoft Research's world-class research, and Microsoft's deep pockets, you can bet that any improvements Teoma would need to compete with Google WILL be made.

Re:Microsoft COULD Make it Work!!!!

[lurker412]

And that would be great for everyone. Google will not sit still either, so we should expect to see better and better search capabilites from both camps. Real competition. Gee, what a thought. Or has someone already patented it as a business process?

Re:Let's get realistic

[metlin]

I think you are looking it at it differently.

Imagine what would happen if Google were to vanish tomorrow. It would drastically reduce productivity of organizations the world over, and not necessarily those that are related to computers.

Today, Google is almost a crutch for a lot of people. Right from Universities to workplaces, its almost like the defacto tool. Don't know an answer? Can't find something? Google it.

Are companies willing to let this happen? Sure, you have a million other search engines. But it sure as hell would hurt (and hurt badly) if Google were to go.

This is something that could be leveraged to investors' benefit> Here you have, a *very* large chunk of the Internet being dependent on *one* tool. Who's willing to make sure that it does not go away? Think about it.

Algorithms are why Google wins

[billstewart]

Bandwidth and processing power are a barrier to entry for little guys, but they're not rocket science, and if you can throw money at those problems, they'll go away. That leaves you with a high-powered useless search engine, which can respond to any queries it gets by showing you the 100,000 hits it found in no particularly useful order. You also left out a third major component to a search engine service, which is a business model.

The reason Google rocks is that Pagerank does a half-decent job of understanding what pages to show people in what order based on their queries, and that's because of a lot of Deep Thought and Experimentation by the Google folks. Another reason they're pleasant to use is that Google doesn't waste page space on clutter - other than a friendly low-res non-animated logo at the top, it's basically just a box for your query, a few links to extra features, and your answers when they come back. (Remember Hotbot, the Wired MegaCluttery Singing Dancing Search Engine?) The initial core of the PageRank algorithm was pretty simple - the concept was that if people build links to a page, it's probably interesting to them, and if lots of people build links to a page, it's more likely to be very interesting than a page that not many people bother linking to. Getting much beyond that is where the Rocket Science happens, and also where they run into occasional algorithm clashes (e.g. Blogger as an edge case), and into conflicts with site promoters who take sites that aren't inherently interesting and try to get Google to rank it higher by trying to put in features Google's robots look for rather than by putting in content that actual people find interesting. (Remember that Search King guy with the link farms?)

Any way you slice it, this isn't good.

[geekwench]

If this is an attempt by Microsoft to keep Google's price low, and maybe cripple their IPO; well, it wouldn't be the first time that Gates & Co. played dirty. If it's an attempt to create a pump-and-dump stock inflation, then this is bad news for any potential investors who aren't knowledgable about MS's corporate history (and don't know where to look for the information. Hard as it is to believe around here, there are those for whom just checking e-mail is a serious challenge.)
Even if this is nothing more than a collection of rumors, as has been postulated elsewhere, the mere possibility that a purchase like this could happen tends to make me think that another DoJ action is long overdue. Although it would be nice to see a decision -- and penalty -- with some teeth in it, this time.

Here's hoping that someone at the FTC has the sense to say "You've got to be kidding..."

Damn.

[superdan2k]

I knew I should have registered askclippy.com -- I coulda made a mint!

It's not what, it really is who

[Effugas]

OK.

First of all, Google is something different. 75% of web referrals come from it. 75%.

This is sort of sad in one interesting way -- The Internet Archive is complete. Without the State of Google at any given time, the archive is incomplete. Archiving the state of Google...

Now that's a hard problem.

Google's success did come from their ease of use and their several-order-of-magnitude improvement over their predecessors (Altavista, mainly, but Hotbot too). The Google challenge really was incredible -- "Put in what you're looking for. It'll be one of the top links. Be as obscure as you want." And they won the challenge.

I'm Feeling Lucky really is an amusingly cocky creation -- "our top link is likely enough to be the right one that we don't even need to show you a list."

It works.

Anyway, adoption was driven by the order of magnitude improvement, and is now very hard to clone -- going from 10 to 1000 is easier than 1000 to 1000000, by far. It's not enough to be equal - - you need to be better, at a degree than is actually possible for search to provide.

But once Google was adopted, it needed to stay in a position of power. Here's where the "niceness" of Google -- "don't do anything evil" -- won. Combine a Stanford Geek lackadasiacal attitude to all corrupting influences, no details about financial hardship, and massive street cred, and you get the snowball that brought us to 75% today.

Google was even allowed to sell ad space, given the "reluctance" and "geekily targeted" (has anyone else made targeting not seem like a privacy violation?) nature of their system. It's very interesting the nature of identity for a particular behavior -- basically, we assign motive to all actions that we see, as a mechanism for predicting future behavior. Google has motives that align with our interests -- a high quality, stable, authoritative source for what we're looking for. So it gets away with things that...say...Microsoft can't.

Microsoft would destroy the Google brand. They can't even donate money to schools without people thinking they're trying to brainwash kids! Meanwhile, Apple's been donating systems to grade schools since all of us were in them. The idea of a non-independent Google is fundamentally uninteresting, and really does create a new market segment:

What Google Used To Be.

Obviously, this is in nobody's interest, except maybe for other search engines. So shockingly enough, no sale.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

If they had bought Google

[Bruha]

That may have made them one of the largest deployers of Linux out there.

Ironic isnt it. Course I'd love for them to try getting all those google servers to run IIS

some random thoughts

[mcc]

The thing is that Google's problems are solely because of their success. The problems all come from the fact that it has become advantageous for various groups to pollute Google's results.

If MS actually succeeds in getting anywhere, they will neatly trash Google's main problem, as it will no longer make quite as much sense to base entire business plans around tricking PageRank.

Moreover: Yeah, Google's having problems. However, Google's goal at this point is solely based around trying to circumvent cheaters. They have lots of time and energy to focus on that. They don't really have anything else to focus on. MS's goal is just to catch up with Google. And once they do that, do you honestly think that they will not have people creating huge numbers of sites just to trick their search engine too?

Any advantage MS would have due to Google abuse would be rediculously short lived. Now, given, this would still allow MS to get a pretty strong beachhead and a strong start, which could be helpful, but MS is historically not good at strong starts. What they're good at is weak starts, a few failed versions, a version 3 that is "good enough", and a version 4 which actually finally starts to cause big problems for their enemies. The abuse&bitrot problems would start to set in for MS-Search at about the time of that firstly-acceptable version 3..

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I worry about conflict-of-interest

[dwheeler]

I love to see competition - Google has been a remarkably good company to its users, but there's no guarantee of that in the future. Having a competitive market in search engines could make sure that all engines do a good job for their customers.

However, I worry about Microsoft entering the search engine market more than it has. I see a strong conflict of interest between providing good search results and shilling for their company and/or those who pay them.

There's some evidence that Microsoft is already being tainted by this conflict of interest. On a lark, I went to www.msn.com and used their "Search the Web" option... and searched for information on Microsoft competitors. I found several cases where Microsoft's search engine gave higher priority to what would make Microsoft more money (as opposed to what the user probably wanted to see), such as Microsoft's official position on the matter:

1. Open Source Software: Ignoring the paid-for links (which to their credit are specifically noted as such), the first few links were specific papers and things, several of which were frankly poor choices. The top ones included www.x86-64.org (huh?) and a South African consulting company. What's more interesting is that Microsoft's shared source page - their attempt to counter open source - exceeds the ranking of opensource.org and the fsf.org web sites. A searcher would usually want to first see the page that directly discussed the searched-for topic, not about a competitor that tries to do something different.
2. free software only mentioned pages where "free" meant "gratis". The Free Software Foundation and GNU doesn't appear in the first 30 entries. Google, of course, returns the Free Software Foundation's gnu.org as entry #1.
3. Linux finds first Amazon (huh?), eBay (double huh?), and then an "Introducing Linux" paper at Microsoft's site, tech.msn.com, followed by a Microsoft paper on how to transfer FROM Linux. Only after that do Linux papers from those who advocate Linux appear.
4. database's first entry is a general site, but the #2 site is www.microsoft.com/sql (Microsoft's SQL Server) and the #4 site is www.microsoft.com/office/access/default.as (Microsoft's Access). #3 is a general directory of vendors. Filemaker is #9, and the web sites of leading vendors Oracle, Sybase, and IBM (DB2), are merely #10, 11, and 12, again far after Microsoft's pages.

This didn't happen all the time. Searches for specific company names ("Red Hat", "Oracle") did okay. But this happened often enough to make it appear that their search engine intentionally returns Microsoft's "message" first, even if it's not what the user wanted. It smacks dangerously close to censorship. This certainly raises the concern that the conflict of interest might impact what users could see; this suggests that this impact is already occurring. And conflict of interest is always something worth considering.

If Microsoft was simply one of many search engines that might not matter, but there's a good chance they'd use their dominant desktop marketshare position to inhibit competition by other search engines. Look what Microsoft did with Netscape, integrating a product to make it difficult to use a competing product. Microsoft was convicted, but that conviction did not restore competition in the marketplace (or cause any other real change). If Microsoft became the near-dominant search engine, then this conflict of interest could result in people being unable to speak out or sell a competing product ... because there would be no way for people to learn of the dissent or an alternative product.