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Microsoft To Launch Homegrown Search Engine
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "While Google is currently the king-of-the-hill in search engines, Microsoft continues to lag in market share and uses Yahoo's technology/results. But Cnet reports that they'll launch on Thursday their own homegrown search engine , although it appears this is mostly a face-lift (despite a year of development and $100 million investment). According to Bill Gates, they 'will introduce a homegrown web crawler and algorithmic search engine ... later this year,' which is almost certainly their tech preview (you can look at this now) -- but will that be ready for prime-time in less than two months?"
You would be amazed. This week I discovered someone in my office who knew nothing about google.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
Since it'll probably end up being default start-up page in IE, lots.
You mean the same people who use the default favorites? I looked at the default list once, then deleted it. It looked like a paid list from the yellow pages of the travel and media sections in the phone book.
The truth shall set you free!
I thought it was only marketing that didn't understand that just because it looks the same, doesn't necessarily mean you've done nothing under the hood.
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Orange. No results for Orange, the mobile phone company.
Linux. No pointers to linux.org.
Google. Returns the Dutch/Belgian version of the page. Why?
Get your own free personal location tracker
Will they be filtering out queries with this engine as well (eg. xfree86 being filtered as discussed here a while back)?
Of course. And while they do that, I won't be using it.
The msnbot has been around for many months. I have seen many complaints about the amount of bandwidth it uses and I know many web masters (me included) have blocked it's access because of this so I dunno how useful the search results will be. I've seen reports of it sucking gigabytes off a site in a day, and then doing exactly the same again the next day, which is really quite serious for those people who have a reasonably small bandwidth limit on their web space.
:(
For me it was sucking several gig a month off my site, and was obviously very badly coded since it was refetching the same pages over and over (cachable pages, non-cachable pages and 404's). So in the end I gave up and outright blocked the damned thing - yet another bit of shoddy MS code out to break the internet..
http://blog.nexusuk.org
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
That looks remarkably like a Google results page, in terms of structure rather than content.
B &q=best%20search%20engine q =best+search+engine&btnG=Google+Search
Example:
http://www.search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=SRCHW
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&
Surely Microsoft haven't chosen to rip-off their design based on the market leader?