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Google v. Microsoft
ph43thon writes "The New York Times business section has an article, The Coming Search Wars, about Google and Microsoft. It's fairly long and pretty interesting. Oddly, the writer or somebody out there, seems to think that Google v. Microsoft is analogous to Netscape v. Microsoft. I wasn't aware that you needed to download special software to run this Google search application. Somehow, I don't think Microsoft will find this fight to be as easy."
Here is the article I mentioned in my parent post, along with the matching Slashdot article.
for those of you who don't want to subscribe to the times just click on Google News
all they really have to do is offer a new service as a free add-on to Windows, then simply build that service into the next version of Windows
They have effectively already done this. The search function in IE defaults to msn search, and if you mistype a url it sends you to their search engine as well. Because of this the popularity of msn search is massively overstated as a lot of the hits are due to typos.
Not only that, but search just plain ol' google with these terms:
/" directory modified
..and whatever term you want to add to that mix.
"index of
You can find lotsa unprotected directories with lotsa FREE, umm.. stuff.
Not at all. The graph theory is important, of course, but web searches involve the following:
1. You have to find the right metric in which to measure the success of your search. The metric is determined by what people want to find. The graph theory is a way to formalize whatever intuition you might have about it.
2. You have to be able to find the results and to deliver them quickly. That's a complex implementation problem.
Graph theorey is no more than a small part of what's involved.
Yeah, but MSN only shows 32 results for SCO.
Google shows 3.8 million. (if the site stays down, how long until they're delisted?)
Searching google for MSN yields 44.8 million.
Searching google for google yields 41.7 million (this page among them)
Searching msn for msn yields 3,389
Searching msn for google yields 102, which, ironically, is listed as an "MSN Top Pick"
Fair? Maybe. Maybe not. It just seems that MSN's crawler hasn't mapped nearly as much of the web as Google's has, but has managed to map most stuff pertaining to itself (which it should).
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Idealogically, a boycot against MSN is a fnatastic idea, the problem is that from a marketing perspective (for commercial sites) its suicide.
Each free click a site receives is invaluable, to the point that a whole industry is built upon manipulating search results (generally those of google, because thats where the vast majority of traffic comes from) in favor of bettering the positioning of their clients. Try googling for "seo","search enging optimization","search engine placement" and the like and you will notice the sheer number of results speak for themselves.
Ironically enough, results provided via this industry often cost more and perform worse then google adwords (first because it takes some odd months for any results to show, and second because googles sorting algorithm change every month or two and maintaining good position takes constant manipulation), but the point is, that the top five results in any engine, be it google or msn, is money in the pocket. As such business entities will set idealology aside; disallowing msnbot is not a viable solution for any commercial entity.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
The Coming Search Wars
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: February 1, 2004
PALO ALTO, Calif.
AT the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last week, Microsoft, the software heavyweight, and Google, the scrappy Internet search company, eyed each other like wary prizefighters entering the ring.
Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, stated his admiration for the "high level of I.Q." of Google's designers. "We took an approach that I now realize was wrong,'' he said of his company's earlier decision to ignore the search market. But, he added pointedly, "we will catch them.''
The four top Google executives attending the forum, at the ski resort of Davos, were no less obsessed with Mr. Gates's every move. "We had many opportunities to see Bill and Microsoft here in Davos," Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, wrote in an e-mail message to a colleague that was distributed to employees through an internal company mailing list.
Microsoft is intently poring over Google's portfolio of patents, hunting for potential vulnerabilities, Mr. Schmidt contended. And because Google is running its business using Linux - the free open source software that has become the biggest challenger of Windows - Microsoft is concerned that it may be at a competitive disadvantage. "Based on their visceral reactions to any discussions about 'open source,' '' Mr. Schmidt wrote in his e-mail message, "they are obsessed with open source as a business model.''
Get ready for Microsoft vs. Silicon Valley, Round 2.
The last time around, in the mid-1990's, Netscape Communications, another brash, high-tech start-up from the Bay Area, commercialized the Web browser, touching off the dot-com gold rush. The company told anyone who would listen that its newfangled software program would reduce Microsoft's flagship Windows operating system to a "slightly buggy set of device drivers.''
As it turned out, Microsoft - based in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, far from Silicon Valley, the heart of the nation's technology industry - was listening.
Mr. Gates, belatedly waking up to the threat that the Internet posed to his business, aimed Microsoft's firepower at Netscape and flattened his rival, which was later acquired by America Online and is now a shadow of its former self in an obscure corner of Time Warner.
As a consequence, however, he brought a federal antitrust lawsuit down upon his company, raising the specter of a Microsoft breakup. In the end, Microsoft escaped with little more than a requirement that it operate under a relatively mild court-ordered consent decree.
Today, nearly everyone in Silicon Valley, from venture capitalists and chip engineers to real estate agents and restaurateurs, has begun to ask: Will Google become the next Netscape?
Mr. Gates, who for more than a decade has promised - but not yet delivered - "information at your fingertips" for his customers, has decided that the Internet search business is both a serious threat and a valuable opportunity.
The co-founder and now the chief software architect of his company, Mr. Gates readily acknowledges these days that Microsoft "blew it" in the market for Internet search. Despite his early grand vision, he displayed little inclination to deploy software that would improve the ability of computer users to find information - until he saw the dollars in the business.
THAT opportunity fell to two Stanford computer science graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who disregarded the industry's common wisdom that search technology would become an inexpensive, marginal commodity.
While the Internet's dominant companies fought one another over Web portals, the promise of e-commerce and access to providers like America Online, Google developed a speedy search engine that soon became almost a universal first step onto the Internet. It displaced earlier search engines because the technology invented by Mr. Brin and Mr. Page did a measurably better job in returning results that satis
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Think not? Just take a look at their history. They stared very simple, sure, but each year the search gets smaller and smaller while the crap gets deeper and deeper. "Portal mode" peaks around 2000 and starts back down as they try to win back some of the Google converts.
I think the herd mentality can often lead to good choices. I wouldn't say optimal, look at Mozilla vs. IE. The problem is that companies are always throwing out as much disinformation as possible (aka advertising). As an example, a few years ago Google was a great source for product reviews; you could type in a product name and have 2 or 3 hits on the first page that would be good, factual reviews of products. Now you will see 70% junk because companies have figured out how to rig it.
What I'm really looking forward to is a decent reputation-based opinions system that is open-standards. There has to be a new kind of moderation system to weed out the 99% of all things posted on the internet that are crap, like my post. Slashdot moderation system doesn't cut it. I hardly read Slashdot any more because most of the +5 posts are neither insightful, nor informative, although they are sometimes funny.
I'm a libertarian at heart, so I understand where you're coming from. At the same time, I'm really disappointed with the free market's failure at developing an information-filtering system like I described that is worth anything. I imagine the solution will probably come from some government-funded grad student working for almost nothing.