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?

[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.

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.

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: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 /.

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?)

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

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.