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MSN Search Has Arrived
strikehosting writes "The new MSN Search, "the first-ever search engine built from the ground up by Microsoft", has been launched worldwide. It will be available in 25 markets and 10 languages.
A few features though, like MSN Music and 'Search Near Me', are available only in the United States.
Sporting a cleaner look and a simplified layout, MSN Search has a more prominent position on the home page. The features that are available here include tabs that allow consumers to target searches to the Web, news, images, music, desktop or Microsoft Encarta."
Microsoft still hopes that people will buy the Encarta software for additional tools not included in the search engine, such as a guide that helps children finish their homework. The Encarta features will make a huge difference in setting MSN Search apart from rivals, said Charlene Li, an analyst tracking the search industry for Forrester. "Here is this objective, fact-based information that you need," she said. "It's really hard to find that objective point of view" online.
For one, the use of the online Encarta isn't completely free. If you make an Encarta search, you'll notice a clock ticking in the left side of the screen: you only have two hours of "free" Encarta (remember, kids, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, especially coming from Microsoft). It seems that it won't stay free for long.
So, here's the dilemma: should one use non-free but objective Encarta or free but biased Wikipedia?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
For the few searches I've used MSN for, it seems to have better results than Google.
Anyone else noticing this?
msn search: "bill gates sucks" - 608 matches
google: "bill gates sucks" - 2,460 matches
Not really shocking, I guess.
I keep hearing stories about how they've finally launched their search engine. What does this mean exactly? More specifically, why is it that the search results on:
my.msn.com
Differ from the results on:
search.msn.com
Seems like a really inconsistent launch.
I'm a big tall mofo.
They just don't get it. The reason people use Google is because it loads fast and just works. It doesn't take forever to load with flash animations, and other crap no one needs. When you want to search you go to Google. If you want to be bombarded with media and advertisements there are plenty of other sites on the internet.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
The first result for "linux" is an actual page devoted to Linux this time.
That's progress, right?
Three Borg stories in a row? Has Slashdot been assimilated?
Flee! Flee for your life! (Unless they're brought Jeri Ryan with them.)
Why doesn't this correct my spelling?
I need to look for a specific word, but I have no idea how to spell it properly.
How can I find what I'm looking for if I don't know how it's spelt?
I'll stick with Google, thanks all the same.
Summation 2
We had to modify our sites to remove session IDs when MSNBot comes by to cut the traffic.
I still will be setting the home-page setting of all my users to www.google.com
On a 56K connection Microsoft's effort is still slow and clunky.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Come on guys. I know we're all rooting for Google in this fight, but childish tricks like that are just not cricket.
Google has a number of advantages, like:
- Repeat the search on USENET, Images and Froogle
- No heavy graphics
- Spell checking
- Indexes and converts PDF and other formats.
Also, it returned results from the United Kingdom, even though the UK only box wasn't ticked!Also, the layout and the sponsored links are a blatant ripoff of Google.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
Microsoft always plays this tortoise/hare game with its software. Every few weeks, msn search will get incrementally, imperceptibly better. I remember back in the day, IE was crap and used Netscape. Slowly, I wound up using IE more-and-more until Firefox/Mozilla came along. If the guys at Google stay on their toes and don't become complacent they shouldn't have a problem, though.
Although I do not like Microsoft, for us the consumer, having the two giants smashing at each other for market share is nothing but good. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've felt Google has gotten lazy. Lots of the search results are nothing but sales sites these days ... with all that brain power they brag about, you'd think they could have done something about that by now.
On MSN's side: they're offering search results in RSS format. This is good; but: (and you know there's always a "but" when Bill is involved), their RSS results have usage restrictions:
Copyright © 2005 Microsoft. All rights reserved. These XML results may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner or for any purpose other than rendering MSN Search results within an RSS aggregator for your personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of these results requires express written permission from Microsoft Corporation. By accessing this web page or using these results in any manner whatsoever, you agree to be bound by the foregoing restrictions.
MSN search looks interesting, for now. But I'm not giving up my Google anytime soon.
Having said that: it would be interesting to hear from some MSN people about the architecture: how many servers? What OS? What kind of interconnect? etc.
With Microsoft, who gives a shit? Remember their "big security push"? Nothing came of it. Everyone who has a clue knows you can't just "bolt on" security in a couple of months. It was all about marketing, not product. Just like monkey-boy's "developers, developers, developers" - all hype, no content.
I checked the server logs at work yesterday, and for every legit visitor over the last 10 days there were 8 attempts to "hack in" using Winblows security holes (stupid script kiddies - why don't you at least check to see what OS is running before repeatedly trying different methods - oh, right, you're Microsnot Fanbois).There's a LOT of msnbots (MicroSoft Nuisance roBOTs) out there.
Instead of wasting time and resources on a search engine, they should first fix their piece of shit insecure operating system. Or maybe they can use google's search engine to find a patch? Buy a clue?
What the world needs isn't a Microsoft search engine - it's for Microsoft to clean up their own mess.
msnbot ate up half my bandwidth allowance in three days when it first started crawling a while back. It's the rudest robot I've ever encountered; Google manage to give me good search results with barely any bandwidth usage, so why MSN has to be so greedy I can't imagine.
Anyway,went straight in my robots.txt. Problem solved.
On Google: The topmost link was a sponsored link from download.com to download Firefox. on MSN Search: The topmost link was a sponsored link from secureie.com. "Download Secure IE Web Browser and Save - www.secureie.com. Compare Secure IE Browser to Firefox and see why it's better. Secure IE seals browser security leaks to provide a faster and..." It's made by a company called Winferno software. I think that was a poor choice of names ...
I don't know what the fuck is about MS that drives people to say or believe such rubbish. If Bill Gates crapped in a bowl, someone like would be posting:
Well, this crap stinks, but it takes too much time to configure my own.
Well, I don't really like this crap, but MS makes the best bowls and I really need a bowl for my salad so I guess I'll just have to take the bundle.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Please note that Wikipedia's number one rule is called NPOV for "neutral point of view", before you go accusing it of widespread bias left and right. Not that it always lives up to the goal of being entirely bias-free, but I'd hardly call Encarta unbiased either, and it makes no claim that objectivity is an object.
And it's not like the two are mutually exclusive, either. If you have Encarta, you can still look up stuff on Wikipedia, compare and contrast their approaches, and learn more from the profit.
But Encarta probably is more suitable for children, because Wikipedia makes little effort to self-censor offensive material that you may not want your child to know about.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
No, I don't. Sorry about that. I didn't realize at first how confusing that was. What I was saying is that catching students plagiarizing is quite easy with google. Heck, many schools pay big bucks to use software for this exact purpose. It is far easier to simply copy a line from their work into google. Over 50% of the time google will come up with the exact source they copied the work from.