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Microsoft Challenges Google
prostoalex writes "Microsoft's MSN division previewed a tool for desktop document search extending into the Web search, Reuters reports from Redmond, WA. The message to Google was clearly articulated in Steve Ballmer's speech: 'There's a lot of Google fascination out there and we share it, and we're going to compete. We're going to compete very, very hard.' Google News points to 63 more articles on the topics, MSN Newsbot provides tons of links as well. ComScore estimates Google's market share at 42.2%, Yahoo's at 38.8% and MSN's at 31.8% (numbers do not add up to 100%, since Internet users rely on multiple engines)."
Just like Microsoft has became associated with "ease of use" (regardless of whether it's true), Google iw now associated with "accurate searches" in the mainstream media. It will be nearly impossible for Microsoft to over take them unless they have a truly revolutionary product - MSN only has such a high market share because it is IE's default homepage.
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
Any Joe Sixpack who types in an incorrect domain name, because he's got too much BBQ Sauce on his fat fingers, does an MSN Search if there using IE.l..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
..by which they just dump money into their search engine until google fades away.
OR they force windows users to use their engine.
OR they do something else that's typical of m$.
Keep in mind that the poll numbers were for multiple search engines. You must remember that Yahoo is one of the most popular web destinations. They already have a massive userbase. If a user is doing a search, and they're already on Yahoo, they will probably use Yahoo search. However, if they were not on Yahoo, the question is, will they use Yahoo or Google? This means that if they answer the poll, they will say "Yahoo and Google", even if they use Google more often than Yahoo (or vice versa.)
So while the poll says that the numbers are "close", the actual hard numbers (i.e., number of searches / number of users) may be much greater for Google than you might see right off the bat.
Google embraces the things that geeks love to have in a company. This is something that Microsoft just doesn't get and will not in the near future, IMHO. The only ground that MS has to compete on is that of the "average" soccer mom computer user that doesn't know about Google.
I don't know how many times I've given out my gmail address to geeks the gotten the response "Oh, cool. Gmail!" But, to the average person, it just means nothing.
01000001 01011001 01000010 01000001 01000010 01010100 01010101
Quantity != quality. Especally on the Internet.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
That said, Microsoft has assured Google's success. Slaves across the world are looking for any alternative to M$. Linux hasn't pushed that envelope. But web services? Everyone can safely and easily embrace Google over M$ for web services. Make me choose between Google and M$ and I'll choose Google every time.
is because Yahoo is the Internet to many people - in Japan!
Gosh. I feel exhilerated every time I get to add "in Japan" to my posts. But seriously, Japanese is the second most prolific language on the Internet and Yahoo is the most popular search engine for Japanese surfers.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Microsoft has really never innovated but instead looked around at what was successful and duplicated it. The problem is, they often then bury the innovator in doing so. Now look at the state of the software industry. There are so players and innovation is stifled. I mean who wants to be Microsoft's R&D department. And they, in turn, have no one to duplicate. They think they're successful, but only in the near term. This type of scortched earth policy simply can't sustain itself.
Just a search engine? Orkut? Google Groups? Catalog? Google News?
Lalala
Why doesn't microsoft just buy Google?
Find documents on the web with worms/trojans/virii and open them for you. How thoughtful!
Keep track of your favorite searches, so when it is exploited someone can sell this for marketing
Like the Windows search it will use up about 90% of your CPU while running, because Microsoft still doesn't get the multitasking thing.
Won't have multiple exclusions, so you always waste time searching through directories where you shouldn't be looking.
Will be too ambitious, searching multimedia, etc.
Will focus on Microsoft Friends first, 'inadvertently' avoid Microsoft Enemies ('Honest, we wouldn't have it avoid OSS/Linux/Sun/etc. sites, we'll look into it right away!'
Will be built into all office products, thus bloating them further, introducing more instability and requiring numbnut PHB's to shell big zorkmids to, yet again, upgrade.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I get scared. I'm afraid the Microsoft will copy the Google ideas, "force" people to use it via their new OS, run Google out of business, then add in all the crap that Google left out (Ads, spyware, etc). But we won't be able to do anything about it because noone will be left to compete.
Google better watch out they don't extend themselves too far like Netscape did. Otherwise the nightmare scenario will come true again.
Think about this MSN in its crappy state that its in right now has 31%. Thats incredible, considering how terrible it is at finding relevent information. If they make it anywhere near Google or Yahoo's quality they will end up crushing them.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
But this scares me, like linux should scare Microsoft. The problem is that as long as Microsoft controls the root of people's machines, they can put there search ahead of google.
In other words, if people turn on there machine, and find a search box right on the desktop, they are going to start using that first before heading over to google. I really believe that the "average" (that's not the /. community) person won't give a damn about accurate results, because they won't be able to tell the difference. If that is the case, then Microsoft will have 0 problem overtaking google.
I hope that I'm not giving the average person enough credit to tell the difference between an accurate result and a non accurate result. Then again, I've seen news reporters claim that because they typed in the word "Botox" into google, that there are 750,000 sites of doctors that do Botox work. You would think that a reporter would be able to understand the basics of how a search engine works. They should obviously be a little smarter then the average bear.
Then again, I guess not.
-asoap
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
Check out the top searched words on the scrolling banner Its quite funny to see people searching for ebay or google as their search string.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I think anyone who pays >$100 per share for a peice of Google is nuts. http://www.investors.com/breakingnews.asp?journali d=22356775&brk=1. They are #1 and only have direction to go.
History will repeat itself, remember when Web Crawler was king, then Yahoo tookover and looked to be "unstoppable".
If msn.com wasn't the default website for IE, this number would be in the single digits.
It has been shown in the past when Microsoft bought Hotmail, they tried several times to put Microsoft NT servers in place of the *NIX servers it ran on. I don't know what the current state of Hotmail is now, but last I remember hearing was the best MS could do was to put an NT box up front for the UI stuff and left *NIX handling the load of mail I/O.
I cannot imagine what A MS version of Google would run on... could it really be 2003 server or whatever?
that if Google has any sense, they'll try to start donating money in an attempt to influence the November elections... so that they can try to ensure once Microsoft's "competitive" push against them begins sometime next year, the person running the executive branch of the United States of America is someone who actually believes in, you know, ENFORCING our antitrust laws...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Also consider that many people do not use MSN search by choice; it is integrated into internet explorer.
The same could be said of firefox; google is integrated there, so perhaps as more people switch to firefox, we will see the google numbers climb?
I'd really like to see a better study than this one. This is a very interesting topic.
If you are choosing your services based on branding then you are just as ignorant as those soccer moms who run IE because it is set by default. Don't be driven by marketing sizzle.
Use a product for what it actually does not becuase it's popular. That being said, Google still seems to have the best search engine. If that changes, I'll change my search engine, even if it's to the MSN home page.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
MS simply will bundle its search engine into the OS and that will be the end of the story. Its a sad fact of life that most people will not change the default anything on Windows.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
99% of the people I know use google for searching every day. A few know about google images, but I would say that 95% of those people have never heard of google groups, news, catalogs, froogle etc.
As it is in almost any business, competition is always good for the consumer. And in this case the consumers are not only us using the search engine for free, but the companies that actuallt buy services (ads, etc.) from Google, Yahoo and MSN. These are the ones that would actually benefit from a price war.
I'd like to see how MS muscles out Google in this particular aspect.
>Google left out (Ads
Google is a serious innovator in serving ads.
http://www.google.ca/ads/index.html
>But we won't be able to do anything about it because noone will be left to compete.
Why won't "we" be able to? You bring up the idea about how Netscape got crushed but what about Mozilla/Firebird? Have you've seen the excellent free content in Wikipedia?
There are alot of people in "we" and some of us don't feel like we are helpless unless some big corporation is on ourside.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
That in turn is a large part of the popularity of the GPL. Microsoft can't appropriate GPL'ed code. They can distribute it, just like anyone else can, and they do. But they can't kill the organization that actually produces it. They can't prevent users from extending it.
In the long run, open source can outlive its original owner. The current controversy over X and the FreeS/WAN transition to Openswan both illustrate that.
Also, Linux *caugh Debian* is gaining enough marketshare that it is a very real threat on Microsoft's radar. As that continues to ascend, there will be a lot of people w/o MS search integrations. Moreover, IE has begun to go south in marketshare. People are realizing that there are some badass alternatives to IE and even without being marketed to use them by any form other than word of mouth. People may extend this logic to software beyond the web market, and who knows, maybe one day people will be comfortable with the .swx format.
(numbers do not add up to 100%, since Internet users rely on multiple engines)
:)
No, that's a lie. I only use Google.
Google's main hope is to control the market for supplying results to other places. They can use RSS for website integration, SMS for mobile phones, voice for telephones. This won't help them this year or the next, but it will save them over the long term.
For the last year, search results have been close to useless for me, because I often get those "search_term_in_url.html" results. Google's algorithm places higher relevance on pages whose filenames contain your search terms, so this gets me a lot of completely irrelevant junk sites that are just spamming Google with their ugly URL names.
Google should disregard URL filenames. It's the content of the site that matters, right? Not the filename. Google does need some competition, and I bet Microsoft is just smart enough to provide.
Also, I wonder if anyone's made the connection that the new MSN search and the WinFS local search in Longhorn will probably share technologies? You'll probably be searching the web and searching your hard drive using the same engine.
It should be followed by "Next Year" as they have been making the same stupid promisses for the last ten years. "An Integrated Browser.", "All of your data at your fingertip." Yawn. Yet all they can do is put other people, who deliver on those promisses, out of business. They could not buy Google, so they will break them if they can.
This time, I think they are up against something that's bigger than they are. They squashed OS/2 by making it more expensive than winblows. IBM could not do much about that with cross licensed and closed source code. Having vanquished reasonable competition on commodity hardware, they were free to crush Netscape because people felt they had no alternative to M$'s OS. All that's changed today. It's easy to swap the OS right out from under M$ and word is getting out that Microsoft is nothing but pain to the user. M$ wanted the world to be it's slave but the world has other ideas.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Hotmail's been running on Windows servers for a long time now. Lots of rumors flew around about FreeBSD, but those were mostly relegated to Slashdot posts (of course).
Microsoft's been pretty open about the conversion process they undertook. They even wrote a paper about it and released it online.
Has anyone seen the Longhorn preview screenshots. There's this big fucking vertical bar covering the right side of your desktop. When I say it's big, I mean its BIG. This bar has all shorts of shit in it that Microsoft can use to drive out competition. It's set up in such a way that it's always visible, even when you're running applications.
Now, from what I can tell, there will be a number of functions you will be able to perform from here. I'm quite sure that internet searching will be one of them. So now the question is, will users continue to use Google even if there is an MSN search field in their direct line of sight every second that they use their computer. Hmm, maybe we should ask Netscape.
Kent Brockman: The results are in: for Sideshow Bob, one hundred percent; and for Joe Quimby, one percent. And we remind you there is a one percent margin of error.
Alright, WHO moderated THAT insightful??? Please leave your badge with the security officer at the front desk, so that it can be, uhh, laminated. You heard me.
Unless they provide a search engine that gives unbiased results, without flooding the page with annoying flash / other graphical ads that annoy, they won't get far.
At the same time I welcome this, both parties will get better.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
With Microsoft, compete doesn't mean compete. It means throw money down a botomless hole until you end up with a product that no-one can refuse. The point is that instead of having to make a profitable enterprise, they can make an unprofitable one and then afterwards, once they've monopolized the industry either by shoving their technology down people's throats and holding it there, or by actually making a product, they can do whatever they want.
At this point, Google's been run off the road and so we lose (once Microsoft has pumped their search full of ads/spyware/etc) the best engine.
im in ur
How good are the ads then anyways if someone doesn't notice them? Isn't that the point?
He's not seeing them because he's not looking for them. They're ads, but they're easily ignorable if you're not looking to buy something - Google's strategy is simple and unobtrusive - I don't see their ads either, unless I'm specifically looking to buy something, and then I know the ads will be relevant and worth my time to read. Other sites try to force 'Punch the Monkey' or GIFs and Javascripts designed to look like Windows, well, windows on you that you're forced to SEE. With Google, if you're just searching and not looking to buy, the ads are so unobtrusive that your mind doesn't SEE them.
You are mistaking "is popular" with "can exist at all". And there is a big difference.
I was referring to the term 'crushed' - Netscape used to be the main browser, then Microsoft crushed it - it still exists, but it's used by so few people (compared to Internet Explorer) that it's just a minor annoyance to Microsoft instead of a real competitor.
Seeing as Netscape used to be the dominant browser and now even combined with it's offspring it struggles to get more than a couple of percentage points versus it's Microsoft equivalent, I'd say it was pretty crushed.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
and they know it, hence the IPO. Quality of searches is way down, outages due to viruses, stiff competition. polymorph