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MSN Rolling Out New Search Engine In July
X writes "Looks like Microsoft is going to release its new search technology soon. The online search world is about to get very interesting...." July launch; looks like they will continue to use Overture for a while, but the competition for dollars and users will definitely heat up.
Google has been pushed into the common vocabulary, like Hoover has for vacuum cleaners and Coke has for soft drinks. It has mind share, and a lot of it.
Google will always reign supreme, definitely.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
Just like the Roman and British Empires, IBM, Netscape, East India Company, and all the other things this exact idiotic comment was made about.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
What ticks me off about this is that microsoft will deffinately put this as the default search EVERYWHERE in Windows. How many people do you know use Internet Explorer? Sure there are many other better options out there, but nobody cares for these because the majority of web surfers just use what is on the OS. This is why IE is so big, and unfortunately, it will probably transend to search engines as well.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
Come on moderators. this is neither offtopic nor a troll. It is interesting.
With a simple poll we can put together much information that we cannot through a comment system. This is a news article about a search engine, and it would be INTERESTING to know what everyone's favorite search engine is.
parent is interesting, i say.
The same way that everyone only uses Xerox photocopiers?
Just because the brand name is in the popular lexicon, doesn't mean that the product will be forever dominant.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
An interesting quote was:
Instead of including paid listings within search results, which critics say results in misleading search results, MSN said it will display paid listings separately at the top and to the right of search results generated by its search engine.
If Google sinks without a trace tomorrow, at least they've forced other competitors to follow suit and remove paid listings as a revenue option.
Actually, I'd be very interested in how Microsoft decide to differentiate themselves in terms of a search product. Obviously, sinking this much money into a completely different search means they must have some sort of strategy for toppling Google off the throne, right ? That's what I want to see.
The more competition, the better for everyone, as far as search is concerned and where the cost of switching is so low (just point your browser elsewhere)
Users came to Google for the clean interface and stayed for the consistant results. I have known so many people who just use their search engine of choice through habit and never ever think to change. I'm sure we all can think of people who stubbornly cling to obscure legacy search engines like dogpile or even msn search (shiver)...
These are the people who just use msn or aol default search tool, and then discover that it is not working for them. Sooner or later they eventually find their way to Google; what would ever make them leave?
Casual internet users don't switch search engines out of curiosity. They have work to do and want answers fast. A new search offering would have to offer a simple, clean, easy to learn interface and consitantly great results to ever usurp Google. Or they could give away free money...
Yeah, like Rome meant the world, IBM meant a computer, there was just "the phone company", etc. I'm sure no one competes with Hoover either.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
Excuse me, I am sure I must be mistaken, but interesting is hardly the word i would use to describe this. What would be interesting to me? A free, non-profit, search engine. Not funded by advertising. It would sort of be like the PBS of the of the WWW.
If I search for anything, pretty much the first hits are going to include Amazon.com advertising books about the subject. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the web? I would like to see only the online information which is A) free (as in dollar bills) to access and B) actually acurate (ie, not written by jr. highschool history classes which leave out all of the details and most of the actual facts).
Honestly, if it would also search articles in magazines and scientific/trade journals, and give me access to the full text, i may even be willing to actually PAY for the service. Something like, $10-$15 per month, even. This would greatly enhance the productivity of unversity students and professors.
IBM doesn't have mindshare anymore, but try to go anwhere without seeing an IBM logo. Cash registers, clocks, everything. They make lots of Business Machines, hence their name International Business Machines. They make a lot more than computers. (And they support Linux, so fuck their competitiors :D)
My other car is first.
This alone will sink it:
Redetzki said MSN will list three paid listings at the top of every search result, of which at least two will be advertisements sold directly by MSN.
People don't want the search results to come in 4th on the list -- they want it at the top.
Also, I found this quote to be sort of funny:
"We're really close to finding out what really strikes consumers as the most relevant search results," said Karen Redetzki, an MSN product manager.
They don't know, but they're really close to finding out what consumers want. Even the word "consumers" says a lot about their mindset. We're just there to buy stuff.
99/100 of my google searches don't have anything to do with buying stuff. But when I do want to buy something, I use google because it's the engine I'm used to.
MS will probably make a lot of money, because a lot of people don't know any better. I've been installing the google toolbar for people, because it blocks pop-ups, and about half of the people who have gotten it from me say that their searches have improved a lot because they've started to use google.
I had assumed that everyone was already using google, but the comments I've gotten suggest that isn't the case.
But google is the company that's driving the industry. They're the people who worked out the best way for an engine to work. MS isn't bringing anything new to the table, fundamentally, other than an ability to use their software to drive people to their site.
They're saying, basically, let's copy google to a large extent, except for a small number of changes that will make the site worse (ie., putting paid links at the top of the page instead of just over on the side), and use our position as a software vendor to drive traffic to our search engine.
They have the money to control everything, and no way to spend it on improvement of their existing products.
(they don't think that fixing bugs is improving the product)
SO they start looking around and finding things to control.
The top search engine uses their biggest competitor OS, so that needs to be gone.
Also it provides a large knowledgebase about competing systems, that must be eradicated.
Once MS controls the search engine business, they can influence the documents that the world is going to read. Less positive info about Linux, more about Windows.
Of course they will tell you that the above isn't true, but they told that before and things always turned out to be different later.
I don't get "paid results mixed with relevant ones" on my google!
That said, I agree with the parent - we shouldn't let our anti-M$ blinkers keep us from taking a look. Maybe particularly since it's Microsoft - these are the guys who made IBM, Apple and CP/M cry, and who got rid of Lotus 123, Wordstar, Visio, Astound and half-a-dozen other major (and good) products defunct. Just because they haven't done much other than rattle their jewellry and hire evil goons in the last coupla years doesn't mean they aren't very, very dangerous.
I hate MS as much as the next guy. But they can't exactly just set this as the default in IE and win the war like the majority of posters seem to be saying.
Why not? They've done it with media player, IE, etc etc. Well they can't because they've been doing it for over 6yrs already and google rose to the top with MSN search as the default homepage and search in IE already!
Install IE, open the browser, up pops the MSN search page. You think just because they make a new search engine and start pointing to it as the default rather than MSN it's going to suddenly kill google?
I might have agreed 6yrs ago, but now having seen that at no time since they made it the default page with IE 4 in win98 has MSN EVER been the top search engine.. I'm afraid history has already shown otherwise sorry guys.
Lets talk about how they cleaned up the search results for Xfree86 and linux and such before making this announcement (check em) and how they will undoubtedly bring the scewed results back if they succeed and become top search dog.
This kind of brings up some interesting questions --
What happens when/if someone develops a search engine that really is better (gasp! horror!) than Google? Will people still continue to use Google because it's entrenched in their brains? Will people say Google and mean another search engine?
No. Used Hotbot for years because it was a much better search engine (to me at least.)
Several people would search for the answer to a difficult question, I would find it easily faster than they did.
When this started to stop, I inquired as to what search engine they used. Google was it.
I turned many people on to Hotbot, and then I turned many people on to Google. When you need information quickly, you will use whatever is most effective.
http://use.perl.org
What the hell is "Friends" and "Messenger"?
And further, why would you use any of those things when there is Jabber (open source and free) and a zillion excellent Jabber clients (some open source, most or all free) which let you connect to ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN and allow you to connect to as many others as people want to write transports for?
More like Kleenex, Band-Aids and Rollerblades.
Indeed, once a brand name enters the common parlance, it has a life independent of the company that it stands for, even if that company loses its leadership position.
Boss (handing you a stack of paper as he points to the Canon copier next to your desk): "Please xerox these documents."
Boss (handing you a stack of reference citations as he points to the Microsoft search engine on your desktop): "Please google these terms."
You might think it can't happen, but it can. The fact that Google is so dominant today is no guarantee of anything except that its name will probably remain recognizable as a verb for awhile. Google will have to continue to compete, and compete well, if it wants to stay on top. It was not very long ago that AltaVista ruled the search engine world, and it did not take very long for its user base to erode when Digital/Compaq failed to give it the priority it deserved.
How many times can MS get away with crying wolf like this?
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Uh, you seem to be missing a very big point.
If you want to use a different copier, you have to go buy one.
If you want to use a different search engine, you type a URL into your browser.
There is no brand lock-in on the Web.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Who else thinks this is bullshit?
I know when I started googling more it had nothing to do with "search technology" but with the relative nakedness of google's page compared with Yahoo's. The less you put on the search page besides the search itself, the more I'll love it!