Microsoft Introduces Competition For Google News

Romeo E. Cabrera writes "In advance of an imminent launch of its own search engine, Microsoft has launched its own version of the popular Google News service. Based initially on feeds from the Moreover news aggregation service, the new beta service (known as MSN Newsbot) aims to provide news on a range of subjects including World, Sports, Entertainment, Science and Technology."

Comments

Paranoid? Maybe not..

[grub]

TinFoilHat time:
I imagine any news that is negative to MS' bottom line will be relegated to the back of the bus, much like Linux search results in MSN's search. Thanks, but I'll use a news engine from a company with in interest in cool tech, not spinning the news to appease stockholders.

Re:Paranoid? Maybe not..

[kiwimate]

Gosh...you don't think that might be because they've only just opened it up and so the vast majority of the site's users up until now would have been internal Microsoft people?

As I look now, a few minutes after the /. story appeared, that's already changing. Number 1 is about Microsoft, and number 2 is about a murder suspect in the UK.

How's this for a test? Everyone on /., go and visit the Tech News Site and click on the Red Hat subscriptions surge article and see how quickly it moves up.

Or, even better, come back to the site after a couple of days and see how it's changed. Then, reevaluate on the basis of some actually vaguely accurate data! Going against the whole rationale of /., I know, but you never know, it might work.

Re:Paranoid? Maybe not..

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

There is no such thing as an American system. You either have capitalism or you don't. Capitalists, needless to say, don't hold allegiance to countries (in fact, they are the first ones to sell out their countries and move to tax sheltered countries like Bahamas or Monaco :| ). Yes, people have the habit of blaming a country. Under capitalism, the corporations are free to move around and do whatever they want. Microsoft, or for that matter any other company, can move to China tomorrow. Besides, the ownership of the company may be foreigners. Many large corporations are inter-listed on other stock exchanges and many foreigners own them.

Anyway, MS DOES innovate. They DO take ideas from others but they make a better product out of it. Why is MS Office so popular? Wordperfect and Lotus had a headstart but couldn't keep up. How come SQL Server is eating up marketshare? It came out of nowhere. Watch X-Box capture market share (I think Nintendo won't release a next version and Sony may have problems). If MS sucks at innovation, why is Visual Studio offer more features and capabilities than any of its competition?

Look at the Linux world. Most of the open-source software(OSS) are clones of existing stuff. The vast majority of OSS software copy Unix or Windows. Why is KDE/X (or Gnome for the rest of you ;) ) lagging Windows? For example, Longhorn (next version is windows) is supposed to use 3D card capabilities (at least that's the "rumour"). I don'tsee KDE doing anything like that in its future version. Why is OpenOffice.org (OOo) lagging everything? Right now,OOo is just copying MS Office and isn't really doing anything innovative or new.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

Trustworthy News Reporting?

[Ridgelift]

Quote: According to MSN, by tracking the interests of users of the site it can determine which stories are most popular and suggest stories that users want to follow based on the patterns of other users.

Great, now Microsoft can collect information on me without having to sneak around. "Your honor, Mr. Public asked us to track his every move when he was forced...UH...opted-in to MSN Newsbot". Of course, they'd _never_ use the information they gather for marketing purposes (ouch! my tongue is wedged into my cheek!)

Quote: Users of MSN Passport can get personalised news depending on their interest during past visits. When logging in to Passport, MSN Newsbot displays news from sources you've chosen in the past.

Passport users? Oh, you mean everyone who uses XP because of that annoying bubble that keeps pestering you to sign-up until you do.

So now I can read all the favourable press on Microsoft, have all my activity tracked and the rest of my privacy compromised so I can have super-specific product advisement beamed right into brain. Gotta hand it to you, Bill, your vast fortunes are eclipsed only by your ability to me, John Q. Public, exactly what I want (ouch! My cheek!)

And it'll be integrated with next IE...

[Urkki]

...so when average user uses the net, he will automatically use MS services, unless he goes to the Special-dialog in the Advanced-tab in some obscure settings windows...

It's really a bit like TV makers would have their own TV channels where they would show content made by themselves, and TV sets of their make would only display those channels... Oh, and using a microwave oven that could heat your standard TV dinner would require having their TV set as well or the result would look all funky.

Re:Oddly Enough...

[Frymaster]

Just annother "innovation" from MicroSoft.

too true. microsoft has talked a lot recently about how their committed to innovation. and yet, their two most recent releases:

1. a news service "like google's"
2. an online music store "like apple's"

Re:Moreover.com?

[1u3hr]

Noting happens when I click on the links. On investigation. "c.moreover.com" is in my hosts file defined as 127.0.0.0, from a standard list of banner and popup spewing domains. So I feel disinclined to unalais it.

Also is it tacky to have a headline: "Michael Jackson 'to be arrested'" and below that an ad "Find Michael Jackson Items on eBay.co.uk", and more stupidly, if less offensively: "Airline Network: Cheap Travel to Jackson".

Re:Oddly Enough...

[Frymaster]

don't care whether or not a company has innovated in the "here's something totally new that you've never seen before"

you may not care, but microsoft does. remember that recent interview where balmer said that linux was "not innovative" because it was just "a clone of unix"?

ms has set their own definition of innovation. and they aren't living up to it.

Good; Shop and Compare

[4of12]

I think it's good that Google has a competitor to keep them on their toes, honest, etc.

I'd be really curious to know if there is any implicit shading of news happening by use of different technology or explicit policy.

One way would be to do this comparison:

1. Use Google's search engine to look up URLs that are critical of Google, favorable to Google, etc. and compare to using MS search engine to lookup URLs that critical of Google, favorable to Google, etc.
2. Use MSN's search engine to lookup URLs that are critical of MSN, favorable to MSN, etc. and compare to Google using Google's search engine to look for, again, exactly the same topics.

This might also be done with regard to favorite wavelengths on the political spectrum, too, to see if there's any differences in returned results that indicate a different political weight (intentional or incidental, as the case may be.)