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?"

Comments

About time

[lightdarkness]

I've seen their cralwer (their new one I presume) around for at least a month, without any indication on where the results were being shown. At least I have another spider to add to my list of robots that steal my bandwidth.

Re:About time

[FireFury03]

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.. :(

Re:About time

[FireFury03]

It pays attention to robots.txt directives (finally, a small amount of standards compliance!)

Re:About time

[FireFury03]

It payed attention for me with:

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

iptables -A INPUT -p all -s 65.54.0.0/16 -j DROP

Or even better, if you have the TARPIT module:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s 65.54.0.0/16 -j TARPIT :)

So

[jbartone]

Who's actually going to use this instead of Google?

Re:So

[MoonFog]

Since it'll probably end up being default start-up page in IE, lots.

Re:So

[Draveed]

You would be amazed. This week I discovered someone in my office who knew nothing about google.

Re:So

[zakezuke]

Since it'll probably end up being default start-up page in IE, lots.

Fortunately IE has enough in the way of exploits so the default start-up page gets hijacked often enough.

Re:So

[Technician]

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.

Re:So

[Titusdot Groan]

Did your company fire them?

I've got a running gag with my team that if I can find the answer to their problem in 3 google searches I get their pay for that week. The number of dumb question I get is WAY down.

Search for Windows.....

[alistair]

No Results Found

Needs some fine tuning before it's ready for the prime time, me thinks.

Microsoft's problem

[ArbiterOne]

Microsoft is branching out too much. Without ripping off Google, I don't really see how they can pull this off. In order to reverse the current trend in market share, they'd have to have a better algorithm than Google, a massive ad campaign, and the popular opinion on their side. Oh, and start giving things away for free (Google: Blogger, Picasa, etc.)

Prediction for most popular queries on day 1...

[seanellis]

"mozilla firefox" download
google

Algorithmic search engine? WTF?

[jagripino]

Don't *all* search engines have to have, hmm, some kind of algorithm in them?

Marketing speak confuses me! Please stop!

this article is oooooold

[evil_one666]

This article is from june 30th

Best search engine

[Libor Vanek]

Just try to search "best search engine" and enjoy what comes out:
http://www.search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=SRCHWB &q=best%20search%20engine

lack of trust

[vinsci]

Microsofts search engine lacks the most important feature: trusted results.

In the past, it has been shown that Microsoft blocks search results that are contrary to its own business interests.

THE bot?

[knipknap]

I wonder whether that's the bot that has been scanning my website for three days by attempting to "crawl" through all session ids and causing more then 1 GByte of traffic.

"msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

It was only stoppable by blocking the IP. (robots.txt was only read once before it started) Great, smart bot, really.

3 bad results.

[caluml]

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?

Filtering out queries

[ttys00]

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.

Search Results

[chia_monkey]

Oh my. I can just see the search results now:

Search entry: "Antarctic Penguin"

Search Result: A paperclip pops up on your screen and says "It appears you are searching for a penguin. Did you know Microsoft servers are cheaper to run than Linux? Would you like to buy one now?"