Inspecting MSN Search

ins0maniac writes "I compared Yahoo, Google and MSN's image search. I noticed that, MSN's search had images from only a few sites. I searched for keywords britney spears and randomly checked few pages upto page number 20 and found that the 400 images were only from 3 domains :| 5in9.com, celebritypicturesarchive.com and nabou.com. This is totally weird as it doesn't seem like a search engine, but a collection of few online galleries." There's a number of other interesting notes in the entry about the new search engine. Also, Britney.

Comments

This doesn't help me

[JaffaKREE]

I already have all 400 of those.

Re:This doesn't help me

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at what you get when you search google images for ".NET"...

Only in France . . .

Re:This doesn't help me

[woddfellow2]

Agree'd

Re:This doesn't help me

[notthe9]

Why in the world does google have safesearch if I still get that fisrt result. I mean, really...

Re:This doesn't help me

[woddfellow2]

Agree'd -- I didn't [buy] a compy to see pornography. :-&

Re:This doesn't help me

[Conanymous Award]

Argh! .NET is goatse's evil cousin!

Re:This doesn't help me

[ZB Mowrey]

I hereby propose that we slashdotters implement a fark-like system... when posting links that might get you fired for viewing, use the acronym NSFW (not safe for work) after the link. Henceforth, moderators should mod posts not conforming as flamebait or troll.

Re:This doesn't help me

[Anonymous Coward]

This was 100% on topic so go fark yourself !

Re:This doesn't help me

[thephotoman]

Look at the domain. It's not from a porn website, but a medical one. Granted, it's still not quite right, but it is intended for academic/professional reference, not for porn quality.

They only filter out things that are porn and hate related, really.

Re:This doesn't help me

[notthe9]

I realize it was not pornographic, but it isn't exactly the kind of thing I'd like to pull up at work or anything (let alone the fact I did not particularly want to pull it up here at home.)

Re:This doesn't help me

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree'd

"Agreed".

What made you think that the word "agreed" could possibly need an apostrophe? I know it's not a typo because you did it here, also. WTF is wrong with you?

Re:This doesn't help me

[woddfellow2]

Oh, I didn't notice. :oops:

Standard MS Tactics

[bigtallmofo]

This is a standard Microsoft tactic. It shouldn't surprise anyone.

1. Launch a web site in a particular genre but don't actually have any real functionality
2. Distribute a press release
3. PROFIT!!

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[shlomo]

you forgot the part about a patch for content in version 5.6.7.2.3.31.a (security patch to follow)

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

Except, when MS does it, step 3 (PROFIT!!) actually occurs for some reason...might be related to step 2 (Press Release). If RedHat launched the RedHat Uber Search and gave a press release, how much of the mainstream media would listen? MS gets the attention.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[PocketPick]

Your logic is true for more than just webpages. It spans basically Microsoft's entire software library. Balmer's arrogantly stated that it "one mistake" was that it didn't get involved in the 'search' industry earlier, but anyone who has followed Microsoft's trail can tell you that thier late to the table more often than not. And even when they are on time, the product is often a faulty or damaged good that doesn't operate at the level of other competitor products.

Ex.
-IE debacle, where Microsoft played catch-up to Netscape and other existing browsers after failing to neglect thier need in earlier years.
-Direct3D, which played second fiddle to OpenGL for years in usability and features till Microsoft finally began adopting parts of OpenGL's paradigm for computer graphics.
-The modern desktop GUI. A product of Apple in many respects, but later was adopted by Microsoft.
-Powerpoint, Visio and other 'Office' products. They were created by other companies, and then consumed by Microsoft.

And the list goes on and on. Today thier trying to same with hand-held media players (derived from the success of iPods), search technologies (coming from Yahoo, Google, and other succesfull search/advertisement ventures), spyware detection and many other Microsoft 'Innovations' that are soon to hit the market.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Foofoobar]

Yep, this is very true throughout Microsoft's history. Whoever is modding you down is a sadly misinformed MS toadie.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[PoopJuggler]

Don't forget Xbox

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be more proper to state that IE and Netscape were both catching up to Mosaic, until all of it project goals had been met, ending futher development. By the time Mosaic was done, IE had surpassed Netscape, which was in it's death-throws. Andressen, always a hack, was then freed up to pursue his much more successful career in outsourcing.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[drsquare]

Well, I think this demonstrates that in order to be successful you don't need to be the first to do something, but the first to do it successfully. They might not have come up with a lot of their leading products, but in the end they came up with something that beat the competition in the market, i.e.:

Internet Explorer: Played catch-up to Netscape, caught it up, then overtook it. Now it's the world's widest-used and most well-known browser and Netscape was beaten into obscurity.

Direct3D: Might have been behind OpenGL, but they took the qualities of OpenGL and made a product that at least matches it on features and blows it out of the water in regards to market share.

Modern Desktop GUI: Yes they were playing catch-up with Apple, who in turn got the concept from Xerox, but they worked on the idea and now they have practically the whole desktop market saturated so much that even a possibly technically-superior free operating system struggles to get a foothold.

Office products? Yes they may have been created by other companies, but Microsoft took them, and all 'Clippy' jokes aside, they turned it into a very decent product and it's dominated the market, and the 'other companies' are languishing on the sidelines.

You may like to bash Microsoft for taking on other people's ideas, but what company only sells things they've entirely invented from scratch? Apple didn't invent MP3 players, Google didn't invent search engines, I don't see you bashing them, the originators of most technologies are dead and buried because they didn't do anything with them.

In the real world, if you invent something, unless you patent it or implement it successfully, no-one cares that you invented it.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[zootm]

An interesting point, though, is that in a few of those examples MS did not stop developing until it was better than what they were competing with - Direct3D (although I'm led to believe that OpenGL is catching up again now) and IE (IE was superior to Netscape when they stopped developing it aeons ago).

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

> It'd be more proper to state that IE and Netscape were both catching up to Mosaic

??? IE about panel:

Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Yeah, sure. IE played 'catch-up' with mosaic...

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Hatta]

It would be ok if microsofts success with "borrowed" ideas was because they implemented them better than anyone else. But they don't. They're successful because they abuse their monopoly status. And that's worthy of bashing.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[pointyhairedmba]

The notion of a "fast follower" is well known in the business world. You let other companies develop new technology and *most importantly* educate the market with their dollars. Then you enter the market as a fast follower with your product where you have learned from others' mistakes and successes. In many industries, it's actually an advantage to be a fast follower. For example when the cost of educating the market is so large as to suck off cash from other critical activities.

Finally, MS has never really been known as an industry leader. They are a huge marketing machine. There's nothing wrong with that, you just have to realize that you don't have to be a market leader to be a success. I think that classic "tech" people often forget this.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[menkhaura]

Allright, but how did they get monopoly in the first place, having as bad products as they have?

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[cosinezero]

Actually... sez here the MS-DOS GUI was first. http://www.jmusheneaux.com/012.htm Although commodore's GEOS was really the early innovator that everyone else stole from.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[BinaryOpty]

Another late-to-the-table story would be Microsoft's C++ compiler. They were horribly late to market with that one compared to Borland and the like.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[gitzlaff]

Very correct. To hear all the mypoic comments about lack of innovation from MS, you'd think the company was going broke or something.

ReplayTV already learned, and TiVo is learning, hard lessons in being first to market with a great product. All the profits will be reaped by fast followers and/or the companies that buy out the early entrants.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

Allright, but how did they get monopoly in the first place, having as bad products as they have?

I can't believe there are still people reading this site who don't know the answer to that question...

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Short Circuit]

Me, I strongly disklike Microsoft. However, here's the best argument I've heard in their favor:

Microsoft buys a company that produces something and embeds a reduced-functionality version of that software in their products. The Windows NT defrag software is a good example; the original version supported running at bootup so you could defrag "unmovable" files.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

> In the real world, if you invent something, unless you patent it or implement it successfully, no-one cares that you invented it.

So, ignorance is bliss? Thank you for clearing this up for me.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think this demonstrates that in order to be successful you don't need to be the first to do something, but the first to do it successfully. They might not have come up with a lot of their leading products, but in the end they came up with something that beat the competition in the market

Depends on what you qualify as success. Cramming products down consumers throats despite the deficiencies doesnt count. Microsoft is good at two things: 1: Taking the other guys idea, 2: letting their marketing machine convince the world its the best thing for them. Typically the reality says that their are more problems than benefits.

Internet Explorer: Played catch-up to Netscape, caught it up, then overtook it. Now it's the world's widest-used and most well-known browser and Netscape was beaten into obscurity.

One word: Mozilla.

Modern Desktop GUI: Yes they were playing catch-up with Apple, who in turn got the concept from Xerox, but they worked on the idea and now they have practically the whole desktop market saturated so much that even a possibly technically-superior free operating system struggles to get a foothold.

Struggling? I wouldnt say they are stuggling. Coming from behind, yes. In danger of failing at any given moment (as the term struggling implies)? Hardly. To coin a phrase, "Rome wasnt built in a day" Even Microsoft took a while before becoming what it is today.

Apple didn't invent MP3 players, Google didn't invent search engines, I don't see you bashing them, the originators of most technologies are dead and buried because they didn't do anything with them

True, however, your talking about abstracts as opposed to specific products. Apple didnt invent the mp3 player, it invented the iPod, which turned out to be arguably the best mp3 player on the market. Google didnt invent the search engine, they invented the way they DO search engines, which turned out to be the best. Microsoft doesnt innovate when it comes to implementation of a technological idea or concept. They wait to see how the rest of the world is doing it, and they either beg/borrow/buy/steal what they need to make a competing product.

Microsoft has become the Wal-Mart of the computer world. Typically sub-standard products targeted to the consumer as a mass population.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[mkldev]

One lucky initial contract and a lot of predatory marketing?

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[the_Bionic_lemming]

1. Launch a web site in a particular genre but don't actually have any real functionality
2. Distribute a press release
3. PROFIT!!

Really? - I'm still looking for the button to pay for the search... Care to point it out?

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Gr8Apes]

Egads, this is a +5 insightful troll? Well, here goes nothing.

MS didn't beat the competition, the competition was unfairly bludgeoned into defeat.

IE: bundled with OSes. Unfair tying when you're a monopoly.

Direct3D: bundled with OS. Marketing BS, promises, and incentives to developers, who fell for it.

"Modern desktop GUI": you're kidding, right? Next and OS/2 were the most advanced, arguably even by today's standards. (Haven't seen Be)

Office Products: Again, you must be kidding. They used threats of increased OS prices to force vendors to bundle Office, so everyone got Office with their new PC. Several incompatible versions of Office later, everyone was forced to upgrade. Why? Well, when the big wigs in government, for example, got their new PCs with Office 97, everyone they dealt with had to upgrade, which cascades quite quickly throughout a 3+ million person organization that does incredible amounts of business with outside companies.... I wonder what that means for the rumored Mac adoption?

Oh, and why doesn't Word allow me to do multiple page unmbering within a document easily? (Well, I stopped trying after OfficeXP) I'm talking about index page numbering, and then starting over with page "1" within a single document? It's not easy to do, if you can get it to do it at all. Also, why does Word print documents differently on different printers? I thought I specified the format, and the printer was subject to my whims, not the other way around? These observations by and large also apply to their other products, which are all pretty much crap.

So, I don't like to bash MS for taking other people's ideas. I'm obligated by my sense of ethics and morality to post the truth when presented with incorrect data.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[l3v1]

Apple didn't invent MP3 players, Google didn't invent search engines, I don't see you bashing them, the originators of most technologies are dead and buried because they didn't do anything with them

Having your head int he sand doesn't help you either, you know. People don't mostly hate, or let's say, don't really like, Microsoft because of it's really and very bad effect on innovation and their being very often late in many matters. The reason why they are obnoxious to many is their market behaviour. And that is something which even you can't reasonably deny.

If you try, we'll make you SlashDot NewProduct Beta 1 and give your right arm free to the masses :) then charge them for the rest :)

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[MynockGuano]

The story was about their image search, and there is a link to that. The comments have been more directed towards the regular MSN search, but you can't fault the /. editors for that.

In practice, though, anyone who is a "nerd" (as that is for whom this news is said to be) can figure out how to get to the regular search engine if they wanted.

-hC

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most of the comments to that effect are a rebuttal to Microsoft's own propaganda about how they are "innovative" and how that is why people should buy their products, or why they need the patent system to protect their innovations.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a chance.

The "lucky" contract was for DOS, which they never had a monopoly with. The monopoly came with Windows, which they never had a "lucky" contract with.

Predatory marketing of Windows? With Version 2.0? Right. I won't even go into 1.1.

Try another guess.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[MillionthMonkey]

Internet Explorer: Played catch-up to Netscape, caught it up, then overtook it. Now it's the world's widest-used and most well-known browser and Netscape was beaten into obscurity.

You left out the next part, where they stopped "innovating" IE once they got their browser monopoly. They left the world to languish with an insecure, broken, and unmaintained product for years. IE is finally losing its market share because it is such an effective conduit for malicious code. Users are fleeing toward Mozilla simply because they're terrified of the numerous security vulnerabilities in IE that have been left unfixed for years.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

Genious, did you know that Mosaic had three phases? No. Did you know that Mosaic lead in innovation until the close of it's last phase pushing out new features which were adopted by all other browsers? No. Did you know that Andressen, and his students that joined him in forming Netscape, were principles involved with Mosaic's first phase? No. Did you know that the newly formed Netscape was quickly out paced by the people who took over the Mosaic project? No.

So, you fucking retard, did it ever occur to you to google for any one of the many browser timelines, or even NCSA's mosaic homepage? No. Much better to just assume a static world, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary. Take two bullets and call me in the morning.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[malfunct]

I would say this is only partially true. Microsoft products in many cases are best in class. Office really is the best productivity suite. IE until recently really was the best browser. I won't play down the fact that they use thier monopoly status to push thier products but if they really were the complete crap that slashbots like to say they are then the market would have passed them by.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

IE until recently really was the best browser.

How can you say this with a straight face? It was never a "best browser". We only perceived it as such. The security problems that dogged IE can be traced from early versions. Just because it had flaws that was discovered recently does not mean they wasn't there long time ago. And if it had flaws from long time ago, it certainly was not the best browser until recently.

I won't play down the fact that they use thier monopoly status to push thier products but if they really were the complete crap that slashbots like to say they are then the market would have passed them by.

Even complete crap softwares still sell due to the momentum and a virtual monopoly. Ask any Mac users what they think about Word 6.0. It was total crap. And it still sold and users still bought it while complaining how bad that was. Why? Because of momentum in the market place. Millions of people already used Word and business requires you to use one for compatibility. It's also used a closed file format. Anyone will tell you that the DOC file format is illogical and confusing. But it's out there and if you want to read those DOC formatted documents in your archive, you needed Word (until recently, that is - and even now the compatibility was not perfect).

There are many reasons why a completely crappy product survive or even thrive in a marketplace. IOW, just because a product does not get pulled out of the market, it does not mean it's a decent or even good product.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they did have a monopoly with DOS early on thanks to the way IBM bundled the software with the PC.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[ClubStew]

You really haven't used Office much, have you? The compound document structure allows for both backward and forward compatibility so long as you don't use new features of a newer Word, for example, and open the document in an older Word. This format is one I know well, having worked very much with compound documents and other OLE APIs.

I don't see that kind of compatibility with OOo.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[jwsd]

It would be ok if microsofts success with "borrowed" ideas was because they implemented them better than anyone else. But they don't. They're successful because they abuse their monopoly status. And that's worthy of bashing.

That's an extreme statement. Microsoft did many things better than its competitors from time to time. OLE enabled drag and drop between a word processor and a spreadsheet, I couldn't do it between WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Windows GUI was easier to use than most X-Terminal GUI or SUN desktop GUI I had used at that time. Visual C++ 4.2 was better than Borland C++ 5.0 at that time. The Visual Studio development environment was much easier to use for small to medium sized projects than UNIX flavored development environments. Even today, C# GUI development is easier than Java GUI development.

I agree Microsoft has shipped many lame products. But many Microsoft haters adamently refuse to admit that Microsoft has shipped many good products as well.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[alw53]

Hiring engineers away from Borland for 300K salaries and then putting them on extended vacations (but under no-compete contracts so they couldn't go back to Borland)? I'm just guessing here.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[blanks]

Very few companies are inovated and then stay on top. Yes Microsoft does do alot of things half assed, from my expierences they will move into a market, make a better product (in one way or another AT that time) but not keep it up to day (a good example is IE).

But products (that they sell) have been staying on top for a while, MS SQL server is a good example, it has stayed on the top because it has alot of features other databases dont have, they got it up to the top fast (with features) and havent really touched it lately.

The XBox I think is their best example of how microsoft will get into a market they are late (very late) getting into. I personally belive the Xbox is the best console available currently (im not talking about games, im talking about hardware and features). They came out with an amazing product very late, are climbing to the top, and will release a new system soon. But I belive this is only because they want to get into the "entertainment" industry meaning offer solutions for tv/movies/media/games etc. Your entertainment at home.

What I am getting at is alot of products Microsoft offers for free are great when they come out, bet receive very little support / feature updates, but products they make money on stay on top as long as they keep development going on it.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[nietsch]

They are a huge marketing machine. There's nothing wrong with that,

There is a lot wrong with that. marketing does not invent or produce anything. They just make the products more expensive and provide salaries to inherently flawed people that deserve a place on ship B.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[magarity]

sez here the MS-DOS GUI was first

Sorry, you don't know the history of computing well enough to read that list. See the entry for 'Apple visits Xerox'. Why is a visit important? What that refers to is when Jobs and Woz saw the Xerox GUI completed and ready to go and therefore it was the first PC GUI. See Xerox PARC entry well above the visit entry. With no management behind the idea it never made it to the marketplace so it wasn't 'first' as in commercial product everyone knows about, but it was first as in developed.

Sorry, no, GEOS was not the innovator everyone copied. See a screenshot of PARC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Xerox_st ar_desktop.jpg
and compare to GEOS developed many, many (computer industry) years later:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:GeOS_Co mmodore_64.gif

Except for some color, GEOS is the same idea as the much older PARC.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[narrowhouse]

OK, I'll bite.

MS-DOS a product bought from another company.
Licensed to IBM partially through having the rails at IBM greased by a friend of the Gates family on IBM's board.

Other DOS products are later coming to market because all of the IBM PC's and software were shipped and built with MS-DOS. First to market equal a temporary but real "natural monopoly"

Windows is introduced, goes no where (1.1)
New Windows (2.0) goes nowhere.
Windows 3 comes out and interest grows. About this time DR-DOS starts to make in-roads with a smaller memory footprint and better tools.

Through all early versions of Windows MS-DOS compatibility is a key requirement because they hold the dominant position in that market.

Windows 3.1 comes out with a mysterious message that indicates using anything other than MS-DOS could have dire consequences (not just opinion a court found this to be anti-competitive behavior years after the fact) 3.0, 3.1, 3.11 all contain some "peer networking" to help eat away at the Novell NOS. (not non-competetive, very shrewd)

OS/2 (first big "non-dos" OS for IBM PC's since CPM) written by MS for IBM. The enterprise market shows interest.
OS/2 version 2 comes out, hailed as the future by Microsoft and IBM.
Development of OS/2 slows, friction between IBM and MS.
IBM pulls OS/2 away from MS, because it becomes apparent that MS has been dragging it's feet so that it has time to develop a competing product.

DR-DOS begins to rebuild from the "mysterious" message in 3x versions of windows. But it is too late, Windows 95 comes out almost impossible to separate it from MS-DOS. Now the GUI is king for sure.

Windows NT comes out. Runs text mode OS/2 apps because of a shared code base.

So there you go. Get the business through inside contacts (hey it's business, it happens), screw one competitor and pay the (small) price in court later to keep your momentum. Screw a partner to buy time, ideas and capital for your next generation product...PROFIT!

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Gr8Apes]

Apparantly you don't know nearly as much as you think about Office or MS's practices. Check out the Office97 SR-1 patch. Of particular interest are the first lines of the description:

Office 97 Service Release 1 (SR-1) is an update to Office 97 that makes it easier for users of different versions of Office to share files with one another. ...Of particular interest to Office 97 users, Office 97 SR-1 includes the Microsoft Word 6.0/95 Binary Converter for Word 97, which enables Word 97 users to save files in the Word 6.0/95 native file format.

Note that prior to the release of path SR-1 on 7/22/1998, Office97 only saved in Office97 format. This gave MS almost 2 years (at least 20 months according to the German language release) of time to allow the irrestible pressure of new systems to force everyone to upgrade. Office97 was the cudgel used to give MS the Office application monopoly it still currently enjoys, precisely how I described it, from 1st hand experience.

And if you doubt MS illegally forced the bundling of Office with its OS via the vendor contracts, read this

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Darby]

MS SQL server is a good example, it has stayed on the top because it has alot of features other databases dont have, they got it up to the top fast (with features) and havent really touched it lately.

The problem with this is that MS SQL Server is not now, nor has it ever been, on top.
Oracle is still mopping the floor with it.
Also, MS has never made money off of it. It's still a loss only funded by monopoly profits on the only products they have that actually do turn a profit: Windows and Office.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[bynary]

Google's profits come from advertising and licensing. No, you don't pay for using a search engine, but see those "Sponsored Results" in the upper, right hand corner? Those are links to websites that some company paid Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to list. Anyone have any data on what Google charges to license their search technology? I'm sure it's not cheap.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[bynary]

http://www.google.com/enterprise/

They deliver entire enterprise-level searching solutions. The Google Mini (I smell an Apple-Google court battle here) sells for US$4995.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[prshaw]

>> Windows 3 comes out and interest grows. About this time DR-DOS starts to make in-roads with a smaller memory footprint and better tools.

But isn't this the problem? By the time Microsoft is moving towards Windows with everything the others in the marketplace are just starting to "make in-roads". It's a little too late to be a better DOS when DOS is starting to die.

So they got a contract through friends (very common in business, especially with a company the size of Microsoft (very small) dealing with a company the size of IBM (very large) at the time), kept some rights to the program they were selling (again very common for small software shops to try and keep the rights to something to resell parts if they can), and just kept selling it. More then 10 years later they replace this system with another and the replacement becomes a monopoly.

IBM got OS/2, they had their fingers in the development of it from the start. Now if IBM could not (or would not) make OS/2 a viable shipping platform how can we lay that on Microsoft? There is no way Microsoft should be able to stop IBM from doing anything it wants, IBM is just too big to believe otherwise.

Have shady deals gone down through the years? Yep, no doubt. Was there luck in the timing? For sure, they could not have done it 3 years earlier, or 3 years later. Had to be done right then or it would not have worked.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't this get modded "Funny"? It is clearly a humorous, ironic statement. Sheesh mods, get with the program.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[amliebsch]

Oh, and why doesn't Word allow me to do multiple page unmbering within a document easily?

What is SOOOO hard about inserting a section break?

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[malfunct]

What browser was better when IE4 and IE5 came out? There were some that had better features but not that were "better browsers" in whole.

I agree that the products have decayed but if they were truely "crap" they would die. Unfortunately "good enough" for the market isn't "good enough" for you and thats why you can buy into alternatives.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Gr8Apes]

What version? Through Office XP this was still a pain to do, or it was completely undocumented.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[ClubStew]

The compound document structure wasn't solidified until Word 97. Sorry for not including ALL Word versions ever released. 97, 98 (Mac), 2000, XP, and 2003 are all compatible so long as you don't use new features. No conversion is required.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[amliebsch]

I think it goes back to 97, but I can't be sure...in any case, with OXP, just insert a section break, and then insert page numbers on that section. Edit the format to restart numbering at whatever integer you choose.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Gr8Apes]

I still think you're missing the point. MS monopolisitic grab happened with Office97. Releases after Office97 were irrelevant in this respect, as MS already had a monopoly.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Gr8Apes]

OK, I went and tried this with Office 2003 just now. After spending about 10 minutes, I've concluded that yes, it is possible, but it certainly isn't a simple or user friendly thing to do. It requires you to jump through about 12 dialog boxes, and you better know exactly what you're trying to accomplish. Oh, and get ready to recreate your entire footer as well, as you can't just reset the page number. Nice.

If you want to see something simple, look at how WordPerfect handles this. From memory, it's about 3 keystrokes and you're done. Now how hard would it have been for MS to add a single right click menu item to allow you to reset the page number increment? (Given their document structure, most likely quite diffcult, as it's crap)

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[ClubStew]

Yes, and shame on them for finally getting most computers - both PCs and Macs - using a consistent document format for once through whatever means they could.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Gr8Apes]

You know, I could go lots of tasteless ways with this, however, I'll take a higher road, and mention that geez, you know, Word 5 through 95 just happened to process WordPerfect documents just fine, thank you. So did Lotus AmiPro. I believe all three majors also happened to read Wordstar files quite well. Now, I do know that Word had a couple of issues with some of the fancier formatting, but none of the others did. Now why was that? Because the document formats actually made some sort of sense versus the verbose crap MS uses. (20Kb file representing a 100% empty document anyone? courtesy of OfficeXP in this instance) So yes, shame on them. Shame shame shame.

Re:Standard MS Tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

> Take two bullets and call me in the morning.

Okay. In which part of your body do you want me to place those bullets ?

britany spears

[Anonymous Coward]

you are the problem! no wonder she is ranked so high among searched celebs)

I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[DaneelGiskard]

... that's why I love science. You can find the best reasons to do the weirdest things ... ;-)

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[stupidfoo]

Searching the internet for images of semi-attractive females is "weird"? What else is the internet for?

You, my friend, live in a weird world.

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[cyklo]

A reference to the Britney Spears Guide To Semiconductor Physics?

It makes for an entertaining bibliography to a research project.

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[stoborrobots]

My all-time favourite illustration from that site has always been the energy levels of the band structure, for varying wavevector...

Sometimes, it's fun to be a physics grad...

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[CactusInvasion]

Yeah, he actually has to search. The rest of us already know where to go.

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[stormi]

http://cbreysse.club.fr/linux/linux_chicks/linux_c hicks.html/ for sexy linux chicks. please slashdot, let's move on from brittany spears.

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[jeremymiles]

Would that be 127.0.0.1 ?

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[mopower70]

I was actually a little afraid to read the article entitled "Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers". There are just some things I don't want to know about...

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[WebCrapper]

I HAD mod points and was going to use them, but does anyone else see the irony of a "Linux" website designed in a very bad FrontPage theme?

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<title>Open source powa</title>
<meta name="Microsoft Theme" content="linux 111, default">
<meta name="Microsoft Border" content="tb, default">
</head>

BTW, they took down the Gallery

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[siskbc]

My all-time favourite illustration from that site has always been the energy levels of the band structure, for varying wavevector...

No kidding. Thought some guy in my research group was nuts when he told me Britney knew a lot about band structure of semiconductors. But turns out, it's true!

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[tsa]

My favorite illustration is the one they put in the Photonic Crystals section. Brilliant, that one.

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[avrincianu]

The gallery is not down, the original poster appended a / at the end of the address thus making blahblah/blah.html blahblah.html/ . But FrontPage ? Beat me, whip me, make me "design" webpages in FrontPage.

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[stoborrobots]

I do agree that the significance of that illustration to physics is deep ... It's just a little too deep for a quick laugh if you're anyone except a crystallographer...

Or to put it another way, all my friends are engineers, and they wouldn't get it... :)

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[WebCrapper]

Figures - I had to back up all the way to the main page before I got anything before... BLAH!

Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ...

[Garabito]

I thought Silicon had nothing to do with Silicone.

A revenue stream..

[phuturephunk]

..Is a revenue stream. The galleries in question probably pay for dominance. Yeah, this seems contrary to a full free search, but at least the results are on subject.

The real task, it would seem, would be to find a way to have the engine return the proper pictures for the proper searches (so typing in Daddy's birthday doesn't result in pictures of some 50 something dude banging some barely legal chick with a party hat on.)

Stuff like that.

Re:A revenue stream..

[grub]

The galleries in question probably pay for dominance

That's what I think however I didn't see results from Corbis.com (BillG's stock photo company) in any results of searches that I did. And I did search for pretty generic stuff (ie: "ansel adams" who, I believe, Corbis owns the rights to)

Re:A revenue stream..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, a revenue stream is a revenue stream, but I dont want to subscribe to the content some one wants to force down my throat. I will stick with Google.

Re:A revenue stream..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah that's what we need to focus on. Making the web safer for toddlers. Right. That's real high on my list of priorities right after designing an optical core network and getting jonny to soccer practice on time.

Re:A revenue stream..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I think however I didn't see results from Corbis.com (BillG's stock photo company) in any results of searches that I did.

I don't follow your logic -- why would Corbis have to have a top position? Because Gates owns it?

Re:A revenue stream..

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to make assumptions on a half-ass study performed by someone with an obvious bias against the product.

Here let me do a study.......

Setting us a firwall in BSD is hard when you don't know WTF you are doing.

There make some blind assumptions based on that.

you sir are a dumbass!

Re:A revenue stream..

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Yeah, this seems contrary to a full free search, but at least the results are on subject.

How much do you think they'd charge to put the goatse.cx guy in a search for sailboats?

Re:A revenue stream..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the OP suggested that sites pay for ranking in the results. Makes sense, but then a company owned by Gates didn't seem to rank anywhere. I'm thinking that their search index just isn't complete yet. They have a lot of catching up to do (re:google).

Re:A revenue stream..

[Anonymous Coward]

If the sites are paying, Corbis won't rank, because Corbis, being a Microsoft (or as near to Microsoft as one can get) property, won't generate advertising revenue for BillG no matter how much they pay. What comes into BillG's pocket comes out of BillG's pocket. Hence, there's no point in Corbis paying Microsoft.

However, if Corbis ranked high, then there would be some benefit in sales of stock images. On the other hand, maybe there are no images of Britney Spears in stocks.

Re:A revenue stream..

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, however no hits from corbis on what should have been stock images, even images that Gates has the right to, didn't show up. I still think it's just an incomplete index.

Re:A revenue stream..

[phuturephunk]

I was using that as an example of off topic things coming up, I didn't have any intent of starting some kind of moral argument against porn.

Hell, I probably have more porn than you do.

Why in the hell am I arguing with someone who won't even sign their name to their posts!!

!!

Re:A revenue stream..

[phuturephunk]

BSD would be easier to use if the entirety of the BSD community wasn't a bunch of fucking assholes..but I digress...

(Again..this crap with me arguing with AC's..ugh..)

Re:A revenue stream..

[Anonymous Coward]

The real task, it would seem, would be to find a way to have the engine return the proper pictures for the proper searches (so typing in Daddy's birthday doesn't result in pictures of some 50 something dude banging some barely legal chick with a party hat on.)

Wait, isn't that what I was looking for?

Re:A revenue stream..

[gwn]

That is why once you know the nature of a search engine sometimes your true search begins on page 3 or 4 of the given results...

Re:A revenue stream..

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not, it would COST Bill money to advertise, while others are paying for the advertisement.

Re:A revenue stream..

[Turn-X Alphonse]

http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=Daddy's%20birt hday%20&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&sa=N&tab=wi

I see no porn

Re:A revenue stream..

[waltsj19]

...so typing in Daddy's birthday doesn't result in pictures of some 50 something dude banging some barely legal chick with a party hat on.

Who says that's not what I'm looking for?

Re:A revenue stream..

[l3v1]

Yeah, this seems contrary to a full free search, but at least the results are on subject.

Nope, the results are on what they paid for to be. Well, how would you take Microsoft SQL to feed you not the data you select-ed, but the ones somebody cahsed in for ? :)

search filtering

[Anonymous Coward]

So, did you turn it off before the search? I did.

Errrr....

[JamesD_UK]

So from one single query to the MSN search engine we're meant to draw some form of conclusion? Could it just be that the search engine has determined these domains to hold the best results and just returned these images?

Other searches don't appear to be similar. I'm guessing that perhaps these companies have paid for higher placement on the example used in the article?

Re:Errrr....

[TechnoLust]

Yeah, since it is a new service, maybe it just hasn't crawled that many sites yet? This is exactly the same as the arguments when the Xbox came out. "There are only 50 games for the Xbox and and hundreds for PS2!" Yeah, it's was Xbox's first day and the PS2 had been out for a long time. It's just typical slashdot MS bashing.

Re:Errrr....

[Rolan]

Yeah, since it is a new service, maybe it just hasn't crawled that many sites yet?

I guess if you consider about a year as "new." Surely in a year it has managed to crawl more sites, otherwise it is a pointless search engine, as it will always be out of date and behind the times.

Re:Errrr....

[dema]

Could it just be that the search engine has determined these domains to hold the best results and just returned these images?

Should the search engine determine which domain has the best pictures, or should I be able to get *all* the results and determine that myself?

I do agree that basing a conclusion on a single search result is a bad idea (and that the cache has a ways to go), but if your reasoning is true that's a good reason not to use MSN's search. Along the lines of "determining the best domains," how would we know if these domains' owners haven't payed MS a little cash to "determine" this? Either way, I'd rather make that decision on my own.

Re:Errrr....

[weeble]

I know a lot of organisations that have blocked MSN search bots at their firewall.

The bot behaves very badly, frequently saturating the network.

Google has a great algorithm that tests total network bandwidth available and size of site and takes a directory a day or even just a page a day.

Once a range of IPs get into an admins firewall, they are not often removed. I see the same thing with IPs responsible for spam.

Re:Errrr....

[Anonymous Coward]

Granted, one single query is not much to go on, however, according to the Google Zeitgeist, "Britney Spears" was the #1 "Popular Search" for 2004. So, if you are going to pick just one search to compare with Google or other search engines, why not this one?

Re:Errrr....

[Desert Raven]

Yeah, since it is a new service, maybe it just hasn't crawled that many sites yet?

No, the crawler has been working for a year now. And, because it's so unbelievably agressive, a lot of webmasters have blocked it. They were taking a few Gigabytes per month from my servers until I finally blocked them.

Re:Errrr....

[pommiekiwifruit]

Well inspired by bill gates announcement I tried using the msn "search" feature.

I tried something simple: "King of thailand".

Google brings up a Thai website with a message from the king.

www.msn.com brings up a british shopping web site that doesn't even mention thailand or the king. Obviously it is trivial to game MSN results.

The second entry refers to a visit by the king to a school in the UK. The "cache" link is broken ("this web site cannot be found")

The fourth result doesn't seem very relevant either.

I presume it has figured out that my PC is in the UK, and so it returns nearly all british shopping websites, instead of something actually related to my search.

Oh well, maybe they will try again in a few years time.

Doesn't work very well yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I searched for "britney spears nude goat dildo sparcstation" and didn't find a single thing.

Re:Doesn't work very well yet

[Megaslow]

That's because of the word "sparcstation"... It is MSN search afterall... Try "xbox" and you might have better success :)

Re:Doesn't work very well yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a few days, and see if this comment will be avalaible from google and msn...

Re:Doesn't work very well yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Pictures of Michael Sims?

Re:Doesn't work very well yet

[Clansman]

nor google, but Ask Jeeves has a reply which seems to promise the earth. I am at work so don't dare proceed towards the glories that lie beyond.

Re:Doesn't work very well yet

[Coppit]

Dammit. I was really hoping Google would have something. I wonder if anyone monitors searches at Google... "Hey Bob, we're getting a lot of hits for 'britney spears nude goat dildo sparcstation'!"

Re:Doesn't work very well yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Result, 4 february 2005

Google: 0 hits
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=britney%20spe ars%20nude%20goat%20dildo%20sparcstation

MSN: 7 hits
http://http//search.msn.fr/results.aspx?q=britney+ spears+nude+goat+dildo+sparcstation&FORM=QBHP

Ouch.

In the interest of the truth...

[gambit3]

I'm going to have to perform this experiment myself.

In the interest of the truth, you know.

Re:Maybe I am being dense but....

[Anonymous Coward]

But what does "Also Britney" mean ?

It means that Rob's little head is less articulate than his big one.

it's ok, you can admit it...

[jxyama]

nothing like having an "excuse" to search for britney spears images, eh? :P

we /.-ers certainly hate her music but apparently she's not as painful to look at. :D

msn search may not be as good as google/yahoo, but the prominent-cleavages-to-image-number ratio is quite high for all three search engines. who's complaining? :P

Re:it's ok, you can admit it...

[pjt33]

we /.-ers certainly hate her music

Not all of it. Some of her tracks are good cha-chas.

Re:it's ok, you can admit it...

[1DarkZen]

I look at it this way, her cds are cheaper than paying for phone sex.

Howto

[digitalchinky]

Yeah, but how do you turn off the damn safe search in MSN... :-)

Re:Howto

[Shardin]

Underneath where you type in your search query there's a "settings" link... it looks all too fammiliar in my opinion.

Re:Howto

[ceeam]

You go to settings and turn it off. That would be $49.99 for me helping you here, please.

Re:Howto

[tehshen]

I'd pay you good money if you tell me how to turn localisation off :) It is searching UK sites whether I've told it to or not. And as there are far fewer UK Britney Spears sites than US ones, this is a serious problem... yeah.

Re:Howto

[ceeam]

Does changing keywords in "Location" field not help?

Re:Howto

[juhanio]

nice feature. This was funny link http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html somebody else also make misspellings

Re:Howto

[tehshen]

I tried that, and it didn't do much. :( If I search with msn.com, it changes it to msn.co.uk, but if I change it back again it seems to get the message. Thanks anyway

I seem to recall

[way2trivial]

discussions that- if google put adwords on the image search results, they were potentially crossing the line of using copyrighted works without permission- to turn a profit - perhaps MSN is only image searching/displaying where they have been given permission to display copyrighted images...

Re:I seem to recall

[Empty Threats]

Whether they're turning a profit is totally irrelevant.

If it's a valid case of "fair use," they can advertise all they like.

If it is not, they could be a not-for-profit run by nuns and it would still be illegal.

Re:I seem to recall

[way2trivial]

I am not a lawyer, but a google search for "fair use" and "for profit" turned up this result which reads in part

In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes

so if it is for profit, does affect if it can be considered permissible or not.

mirrordot link

[linhux]

http://mirrordot.com/stories/5defdb2c0e9cac7c89624 a2594f96717/index.html

mirrordot doesn't seem to have archived all the images yet though...

Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

This is totally weird

You know what else is totally weird? People searching for Brittany Spears. I bet you listen to her classics too.

Thumbnails Don't Match

[TexTex]

For research, I checked out some of those pictures returned by the Britney search.

Many of the thumbnails displayed aren't the same picture that's retrieved when you click on the link. So, their cache must be outdated already. When I'm browsing thumbnails, I expect...no I demand...my search engine to return the appropriate photos!

Re:Thumbnails Don't Match

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, when I click on thumbnails, I am usually looking for INAPPROPRIATE photos....

Re:Thumbnails Don't Match

[Acer500]

Happens with Google too.

It must be difficult to keep an image cache up to date. Not to mention it's a beta.

Re:Thumbnails Don't Match

[Dr. Cody]

When I'm browsing thumbnails, I expect...no I demand...my search engine to return the appropriate photos!

You know, it's a wonder nobody has started spoofing image thumbnails by returning a different image when a Googlebot comes by.

Surfer: Mmmmm... Hot, nude bored housewives...

*click*

Website: Hello.jpg!

Re:Thumbnails Don't Match

[ad0gg]

I guess you don't use googles image search much, that thing is at least two months out of date compared to the main index.

Expectations

[FullMetalAlchemist]

I don't really expect anything from MSN search at this point, it will require some major fine-tuning to become really powerful.

On the other hand, I don't expect any reviews of MSN search to be any good so early on either. Simply because, if you're a googler or some other search engine user, you like what that one offers for a reason; switching is hard.

Re:Expectations

[DrXym]

Switching isn't hard if the initial product sucks.

I used to use Altavista and I hated it with a passion. It would return reams of junk sites stuffed with meta keywords. As soon as I discovered Google I jumped ship immediately simply because Alta Vista stunk and Google didn't. And it still doesn't.

Of course when Google works so well, switching is going to be hard. After all, what does MSN Search (or A9.com for that matter) do that I need? Sure they might have some unique features, but to take A9.com as a site I've tried, those features are mostly gimicks and some of them are very odious - such as tying your searches to your Amazon.com cookie, and sticking a9.com search bars in annoying places on sites like imdb.com.

If MSN do the same or direct you to "partner sites", or deliver less accurate results (likely) or associate your searches with your MSN id, they may as well flush their money down the toilet since its doomed to mediocrity. Besides which other portals such as Yahoo! have established search engines, and I'd be surprised if they got a tenth of the traffic of Google, so what's so amazing about the MSN engine?

Lack of returned hits...

[Shardin]

I'm no MS supporter, but do you think this might be because the new search engine has been crawling the web for a fraction of the length of time Yahoo and Google have been crawling the web?

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[Sabu mark]

do you think this might be because the new search engine has been crawling the web for a fraction of the length of time Yahoo and Google have been crawling the web?

But it's only catalogued three domains. What, is it searching depth-first?

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[ceeam]

Actually they all claim to _totally_ refresh their DBs in 2-7 days, IIRC. How does it matter for how long they have been doing this then?

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[Chess_the_cat]

Then again this is based on the submitter "randomly checking a few pages up to page number 20."

Not very scientific.

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

I'm no MS supporter, but do you think this might be because the new search engine has been crawling the web for a fraction of the length of time Yahoo and Google have been crawling the web?

Perhaps, but they still have been crawling the web for months... should be plenty of time.

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[Otter]

Their page search DBs, yeah. But Google's image search updates on the order of months, not days. (Remember when they didn't have Abu Ghraib images for a while and Taco decided it was Crushing of Dissent by Karl Rove?) Presumably they update so slowly for a reason, one that might apply to MSN as well.

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[geoffspear]

The MSN bot has been singlehandedly responsible for about a fivefold increase in my site's visits stats. My site is of no interest to anyone, and very rarely changes at all. Google rarely spiders me, and can find anything I've got on my site.

I don't know about depth searching, but there's definite;y something wrong with msn's search strategy.

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[dustmite]

Seems unlikely, as the MSN search has been under development and actively crawling for something like a year now at least. I've seen its bot crawling my own websites many months back.

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[PornMaster]

msnbot has been quite aggressive in the past month crawling my sites more often than googlebot or Slurp (Inktomi/Yahoo)

I don't think "they haven't been doing it as long" counts for much when you're talking about a company with tens of billions in its warchest and a targeted mission to topple competitors.

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[Anonymous Coward]

if you dont like it, then just fucking exclude the bot with robots.txt ...

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[geoffspear]

I don't care if they want to spider me. I also don't really care if they exclusively spider me and don't include any other sites on the net, because I don't use their search engine and have no interest in how good or bad their results are.

I'm just pointing out that if they're not including a lot of sites but they do spider mine a couple of times a day, they're doing something wrong with their technology.

Re:Lack of returned hits...

[Flatline_hun]

Great! Let's make a slogen of it: What do you want to find today? MSN - search 0.01% of the web.

Re:Maybe I am being dense but....

[Reckless Visionary]

"Also, Britney" is an indirect reference to the amusement one feels due to the relevance of Britney Spears in this story. It also serves as a masculine form of code-speech in the form of silence, the silent element which follows "Also, Britney" best interpreted as "You know what I mean? She's hot, right?"

search for "linux"

[CausticPuppy]

...and the very first link on the page (under "sponsored sites") is:

www.microsoft.com
Windows outperforms Linux: Industry case studies and test lab results provide insight into the advantages of the Microsoft®...

Re:search for "linux"

[TheViffer]

On the flip side, is if you do a search for "best operating system", your first result is linux.org. In fact, I was not even able to find Microsoft listed. Amiga and QNX even came up before Windoze.

Guess the search engine is not so bad after all.

Re:search for "linux"

[mrjb]

At least your search returned English pages first, I'm getting Dutch pages first, even when my preferences are set to 'Search pages in all languages' instead of Dutch. Yes, I'm in Holland, but when searching for Linux I really have more use for pages in English.

Re:search for "linux"

[095]

The result is Debian, although the extract doesn't even contain the word "best".

Re:search for "linux"

[waltsj19]

In fact, I was not even able to find Microsoft listed.

Actually, I found the 32nd article listed to be the very first one that about Windows at all. I opened the article to see what it said and the very first line in it was:

"Your Microsoft Windows desktop systems are vulnerable to viruses and similar unwanted intruders."

Seems like M$N Search hit that one right on.

Re:search for "linux"

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"...and the very first link on the page (under "sponsored sites") is:"

So, apparently Microsoft is using the "sponsored sites" part of their search engine to promote their products.

WHY IS THIS A BIG DEAL AT ALL?

NBC advertises GE on their network all the time, and I can bet that they get the advertising at an extremely discounted rate, if not for free.

It's not like Microsoft is trying to pass it off as a legit result.

Slashdotted

[mreed911]

The original article has been /.'ed already, but there's a cogent point to be made:

Unless the images are titled, tagged, annotated, etc., there's no good way to index them.

If I just throws a bunch of images up on a web site, there's not good technology, other than some pretty advanced facial recognition stuff, that can determine who, or what, a particular picture represents.

Change the resolution, color depth, etc. and I change the checksum for the image, so the index fails to recognize that one picture is the "same" as another, just resized, etc.

I see a lot of that on Google's image search - but can't find a way around it, either.

Re:Slashdotted

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Change the resolution, color depth, etc. and I change the checksum for the image, so the index fails to recognize that one picture is the "same" as another, just resized, etc.

So resize the image to a standard max size and depth (256x256 max size jpeg with retained aspect ratio), then hash the individual luminance data into a thumbprint that can be compared. Checking for dupes becomes easier and similarity checks are doable.

Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

MSN Search - New and Improved By: Gaurav Sharma
February 2, 2005

Read about New MSN search @ /. and then read its review on Abhi's Blog.

I don't agree with the review completely, even though I am a google fan.

So, I did a similar testing, but included Yahoo to the list with the keywords britney spears.

yes, MSN produces about 10k results whereas Google produces 125k and yahoo produces 110k.

I don't think MSN should produce 10k results without any reason. I personally don't think that Britney would have more than 10k pictures online (or may be offline too?)

What I noticed was that, MSN's search had images from only a few sites. I randomly checked few pages upto page number 20 and found that the images 20*20 = 400 images were only from 3 domains :| 5in9.com, celebritypicturesarchive.com and nabou.com. This is totally weird as it doesn't seem like a search engine, but a collection of few online galleries. It seems like they haven't indexed the images but have used a froogle like concept (may be thats what they are upto.) or one of their employees went to different online galleries and added the galleries to be indexed and then indexed them. Also a lot of wallpaper kind of images are indexed. There is a series of 2 or 3 images shown adjacent to each other. The only differene is their size, like 640 X 480, 800 X 600, 1024 X 768.

The links from celebritypicturesarvhive.com are mismatching. The thumbnails point to a wrong picture. There are a lot of them like these, which makes one think that it is something like froogle, where the webmaster of the gallery got some error in counting the offset of the image thumbnail and the actual link.

Apperantly, I noticed that out of first 8 results on Google, 2 pair of images were very similar. I think they should try to avoid the repetition in the results (atleast on the same page.)

Abhi claims that MSN search does not have a content filter, which is not true. MSN search engine DOES have a content filter, which actually works better than Google.

You might wanna checkout these screenshots:

Yahoo, Google (Warning: image contains nudity), MSN.

You can note that all of the three search engines were set to the highest leve of content filteration (or safe search) and both Yahoo and MSN are set to Black & White images while Google is set to Grayscale. It is very technical and accurate when Google claims that those images are grayscale, while it shows only dichromatic images when black and white mode is set.

The difference between grayscale and black and white images MIGHT confuse a layman as the grayscaled images are generally called black & white images. Yahoo and MSN are taking search for dummies approach.

I understand that no software can be 100% accurate in checking explicit stuff, but Google doesn't say that on the settings page. Both Yahoo and MSN have put the disclaimers by their safe search settings and in MSN & Yahoo if you try to remove the content filtering, it asks you to "Agree" a disclaimer. This doesn't affect the user experience a lot, but can definetly avoid lawsuits.

I also noticed something really interesting. Yahoo has a "SafeSearch Lock" which is only available to Yahoo members (every other net user is a Yahoo member.) MSN search doesn't provide a Lock kind of option, but it doesn't control the safe search through the URL passed.

For example if I search something in no-filtering mode and copy paste the resulting URL on a website. When someone clicks it with settings = strict-filtering, his settings are not changed. The results are displayed in the strict-filtering mode. So I believe, MSN is using cookies for this purpose. There might be some way to change the mode through the url (I didn't check if any exists), but it is atleast not in the MSN generated URL.

On the other hand Google produces a link with a parameter "safe" if safe=active it means the safe search is on, but if safe=off then it

MSN image search not really a search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

The MSN image search is not a full fledged search engine but rather a collection of online galleries, particularly MSN affiliated ones. I don't know who would find that actually useful since Google, Yahoo, and the others do a so much better job.

But if you add the word "naked"...

[SpottedKuh]

...to the search, and turn SafeSearch off, then MSN gives you a whopping 12 results! Hmm...perhaps MSN is trying to censor the net, even when we set the preferences not to.

Re:But if you add the word "naked"...

[Shardin]

To turn off safesearch:

goto:
http://search.msn.com

click settings:
[Which will bring you to:]
http://search.msn.com/settings.aspx?ru=%2f&FORM=SE HP

Try not to get confused and think you're using google...

On the third section from the top click "off"

You'll find the "Save" button in the lower right hand corner if you scroll down.

I was going to read through the source code and post a GET link which would turn it off for you... but I'm not about to read through that code at 8:45 in the morning. Sorry, folks.

PS.. I notice there are different language settings.. do you suppose MS will offer translation services?

Also, incorrect image links

[Swedentom]

Clicking most of the Britney pictures from celebritypicturesarchive.com displays a completely different picture than the one you clicked (still a picture of britney, though).

:-/

Why god, Why?

[DoubleDangerClub]

Britney? Come on, she's so last season, did you even see the Google.com zeitgeist? It's all about runner up Paris Hilton this year. lol.

Re:Why god, Why?

[Master of Transhuman]

You're right...and I've got 707 pictures of either Paris, Nicky or both...(with or without Nicole Ritchie)...

And for the record, Paris is better looking (if a bit skinnier) than Britney...

Also, Paris makes no bones about actually fucking...

The only remaining question is: which one is dumber? I mean, Britney doesn't even know who the Prime Minister of England is WHEN SHE'S IN THE COUNTRY...

Re:Why god, Why?

[arkanes]

In her defense, what the hell does that matter? I've travelled to a number of foreign countries and couldn't have told you who the prime minister was. I don't check up on state governors when I cross state lines. You almost certainly don't know her grandmothers name, or her agents name, or the engineer who recorder her last album. Because you don't care. I don't especially care who the PM of England is, whther I'm there or not. You're confusing "She doesn't know the same things I do" with "She's stupid".

None of which to say that she might not be stupid - she's certainly done some crazy/foolish things and knowing what little I do about her background it wouldn't suprise me to know that she's a few bricks short of a load.

Re:Why god, Why?

[Master of Transhuman]

Don't be ridiculous...

If you're in England, the closest English-speaking ally of the US, you would be expected to know who the head of government is.

We're not talking about Sri Lanka, Colombia or some other benighted place.

Not knowing Tony Blair's name is like not knowing London is in England...

Of course, there are plenty of "educated" US citizens who can't find Italy on a map...

Not to mention the fact that she's viewed in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" saying "We should trust our President"... That's as fucking dumb as it gets...

Re:Why god, Why?

[PGillingwater]

The head of government of the UK (which includes England) is Liz Windsor, or Queen Elizabeth II to the plebs. Tony bLiar is Prime Minister.

Re:Why god, Why?

[Master of Transhuman]

I assume even Britney knows about Queen Elizabeth...I think...maybe...but who knows? Has she been asked?

Americans do seem to know their royalty - mostly due to the tabloids they read, apparently. They don't seem to know much of anything else that doesn't involve either Hollywood or murder cases...

it looks like...

[jxyama]

MSN image search is returning results where the image filename actually contains "britney" and "spears." as far as i saw on the first page of the results, all the files have "...britney_spears....jpg" name. if such is the algorithm being used, this severely limits the number of possible hits.

this is contrary to google image search where it's not simply searching for filenames. google search seems to understand that images of britney spears need not have "britney" and "spears" in the filename.

Re:it looks like...

[robertdfeinman]

Since my web site is mostly photographs I have spent a lot of time on this issue. All the search engines do a poor job of non-text material. I've attempted to give them some help by including meta-data in the image, but as far as I can tell they don't use it. MSN spider has been through my site many times over the past year. They don't seem to just crawl parts of it. For an extended essay on this topic you can visit this page on my site:
http://robertdfeinman.com/society/search_technique s.html
It's part of an overall concern on the gatekeeper effect that having only a few search engines creates.

Re:it looks like...

[jxyama]

very interesting read! thanks for the reference!

Too New.

[Deathlizard]

The MSN Search right now is too new to get an accurate reading on how it is going to ultimately perform.

Google has been around for years spidering sites where MSN Search has only been around for a few months.

The real test is going to be a year from now, when it's had more than enough time to spider a good portion of the web. Even Google's search paled in comparison to Altavista at first until at least 6 months passed. After a year passed its searches were much better since a good portion of the web was spidered by it.

At this point in the game, It would have to be an absoletly amazing site to take Google out, and I don't think MSN Search is the site thats going to do it.

Re:Too New.

[Anonymous Coward]

MSN new . . . Google old

If they were unprepared to compete, they shouldn't have released yet.

Re:Too New.

[InfiniteWisdom]

Google crawls over most of the web every other day. It does NOT take a year to spider the whole web... a month or two at most. If it took a year to spider the web, the results would be to out of date to be useful anyway.

Re:Too New.

[Anthony Boyd]

The real test is going to be a year from now, when it's had more than enough time to spider a good portion of the web.

My God. If it takes MSN a YEAR to index the Web, when Google re-indexes the entire thing every 2-4 weeks, then MSN search is in serious, serious trouble. It will never be able to compete at that rate. MSN search should be fully indexed within weeks of its launch, preferably days if it's any good.

What I will grant you is that over the course of a year, the search algorithms should be refined, resulting in more accurate results. But volume? With concurrent threads and multiple boxes -- which Microsoft, of all companies, should have -- it ought to be sucking down a massive quantity of Web sites right away.

Re:Too New.

[cmburns69]

"At this point in the game, It would have to be an absoletly amazing site to take Google out, and I don't think MSN Search is the site thats going to do it."

MSN may not be able to do it... yet.

Microsoft has a long history of entering into a field as a heavy underdog, and coming to dominance with their marketing (and sometimes technological) wizardry.

It's not over until the fat lady sings!

Re:Too New.

[blanks]

"At this point in the game, It would have to be an absoletly amazing site to take Google out, and I don't think MSN Search is the site thats going to do it."

No it wont, all that will need to be done is to get people who:
a) Dont care about what search engine they use, they juse use what they have available.

b) people who just search from the address bar (built in feature in IE).

c) people who are new to computers and will just use the MSN search (start page) that will im sure use the new MS search engine.

d) will use the new built in tool bar search that MS will totally come out with for IE very soon (but not for other browsers).

This is how MS will become dominant, they have ways to offer (or force) customers into using the search engine that other companies (google yahoo) can not.

With the next version of IE (when I guess they will have the built in tool bar) I can guess that the number of uses will jump much higher then expected.

Unbelievable!

[Sophrosyne]

http://search.msn.com/images/results.aspx?q=kelly+ ripa+camel+toe&srch_type=2&FORM=QBIN
I'm sorry, but this is where I draw the line-- it's completely unusable

Re:Unbelievable!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go...

http://www.celebritycollector.com/free/Kelly-Ripa1 .jpg

feel better?

Re:Unbelievable!

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on now... google only has a couple images for that... MSN isn't THAT far off.
http://images.google.com/images?q=kelly%20ripa%20c amel%20toe&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&sa=N&tab=wi

Re:Unbelievable!

[catdevnull]

Google: Your Fetish Finder

Forget about Britney!

[SoTuA]

what about "natalie portman naked petrified hot grits"?

Re:Forget about Britney!

[Anonymous Coward]

Man those were the good old days

Re:Forget about Britney!

[Master of Transhuman]

Searching for WMDs still brings up "not found"...

Re:Forget about Britney!

[AxB_teeth]

> what about "natalie portman naked petrified hot grits"?

It's really odd you mention that. That's exactly how I got *here*.

Spin...

[Reignking]

Way to put a spin on what you were actually doing. Inspecting? Sure...

Other options?

[gosand]

nothing like having an "excuse" to search for britney spears images, eh? :P

Would you rather the author did an image search on RMS?

Re:Other options?

[gosand]

Actually, after I posted this, I did that - searched for "RMS" on Google and MSN's image searches. In the first page, there was only one picture of Richard M Stallman on the MSN search, while the Google one was full of them.

Now whether or not that is a good thing, I'll leave up to the reader.... :-)

Re:Other options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man you owe me a new keyboard.. I spilt a mug of coffee when reading your post.. goddam funny

Are you sure..

[KinkifyTheNation]

It was MSN Search you were inspecting?

Msn doesn't find Gates' homepage - Google does

[traffi]

Searching for 'bill gates' in MSN returns the page Bill Gates As Mabus. Apparently this project is dedicated to finding the human manifestation of the anti-Christ.

None of the first 10 results (searching from the uk) return his homepage.

Searching with Google turns up Bill Gates' Web Site - Home Page.

Which means: Stick to Google.

Re:Msn doesn't find Gates' homepage - Google does

[Anonymous Coward]

they've already fixed that. search.msn.com brings back BGs home page now
maybe it's a UK thang?

Re:Msn doesn't find Gates' homepage - Google does

[oPTIKALfIRE]

Ummm...try again when you goto search.msn.com and type bill gates guess what the first hit is....

www.microsoft.com/billgates

Though that is sort of scary in its own right ;)

I think the msn.co.uk difference means they're at least using different indexes for their countries ;) ... I was afraid they weren't even doing that right :)

oPT

Re:Msn doesn't find Gates' homepage - Google does

[cashman73]

Likewise, I did an image search on msn.com for "William H. Gates, III", which only returns 11 images of Bill. There's also four pictures of some older guy who's apparently Bill's dad, and three pictures of Gates Hall, a building named after either of the two (some kind of law school).

Performing an MSN Image Search for "Bill Gates", returns 2,134 images from a variety of web servers, although newsimg.bbc.co.uk seems to be the most popular server that offers images. They apparently didn't screen these, because the 6th and 10th images are Bill's Albuquerque arrest photo, and the ninth photo is a PhotoShopped image of Bill holding up a bright red nazi-like flag and saluting in nazi-esque fashion,...

Der Fuhrer Bill

To be fair, a Google Image Search for "Sergey Brin", returns 500 images, and a similar search for "Larry Page", returns 1,140 images.

Re:Msn doesn't find Gates' homepage - Google does

[Anonymous Coward]

I did this test yesterday, and Gates' bio page was actually only the 3rd result in the list on msn.com. It was first on Google's results.

I guess this shows the search is fine-tuning itself quite nicely.

Here's another mangling

[Anonymous Coward]

When Cory did a search for his own site, boingboing, he was referred first to two others:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/01/msn_search_la unches_.html/

Search for "sex"...

[Barnoid]

MSN Search

while the first few result are still remotely related to what I expected (sex offender registries, sex - by teens for teens), the ninth link is cool:

Microsoft Corporation
The entry page to Microsoft's Web site. Find software, solutions, answers, support, and Microsoft ... Last Updated: Monday, January 31, 2005 - 12:00 A.M. Pacific Time Manage
* www.microsoft.net

I'm amazed how stupid and desperate these guys there must be.

Re:Search for "sex"...

[Quixote]

I'm sorry, but I had to try this: search for anal sex and Microsoft's homepage is ranked #2 now! I kid you not.

Re:Search for "sex"...

[Barnoid]

I'm sorry, but I had to try this: search for anal sex and Microsoft's homepage is ranked #2 now! I kid you not.

did you see what #1 is? United States Senator Rick Santorum's webpage hosted on senate.gov ;-)

Re:Search for "sex"...

[innot]

I tried your link...

It redirected me to search.msn.de which is fine with me as I do live in Germany. But instead of good old fashioned adult sites I got:

* Searching for sex may result in sexual content

yeah - thats what I am looking for :-)

Change your search terms to get results.

[Sound of me leaving MSN Search site in highspeed]
Okay, so I haven't missed anything by ignoring MSN.

BTW here is the original (untranslated) response:
Bei der Suche nach sex werden möglicherweise sexuelle Inhalte ausgegeben.

Ändern Sie Ihre Suchbegriffe, um Ergebnisse zu erhalten

Re:Search for "sex"...

[shades66]

looks like microsoft is reading slashdot today !

try the search now and no microsoft listed!

Re:Maybe I am being dense but....

[kenji_watanabe]

Assuming you are writing from a warm room, somewhere near sea level, you have a density of approximately 1g/cm^3. So yes, you are relatively dense.

Because everyon keeps asking...

[Shardin]

To Turn off SafeSearch:

goto:
http://search.msn.com

click settings:
[Which will bring you to:]
http://search.msn.com/settings.aspx?ru=%2f&FORM=SE HP

Try not to get confused and think you're using google...

On the third section from the top click "off"

You'll find the "Save" button in the lower right hand corner if you scroll down.

I was going to read through the source code and post a GET link which would turn it off for you... but I'm not about to read through that code at 8:45 in the morning. Sorry, folks.

PS.. I notice there are different language settings.. do you suppose MS will offer translation services?

Re:Because everyon keeps asking...

[Shardin]

Yes, it WOULD kill them to pretty print their source code. IE's parser might not know what to do with it.

Something actually kinda weird and off

[fabs64]

first two things i searched on the new engine, betterontoast and seriouslogic, didn't come up with their official dns registered pages. www.seriouslogic.com and www.betterontoast.com (these are real).
I found this rather strange and brings into question the size of the msn cache.

The New MSN Search

[kilodelta]

It's nothing but a poor adverisiting agent. For example, shills have been all over various message board and Usenet about the new white pages search. Problem is that it takes you to a pay site where the info is incorrect in most cases. A Pox on Microsoft!

Search Engine Results

[Anonymous Coward]

It is important to remember that the best search engines return what you are looking for in the LEAST number of results. So one engine returning 134 things where another returns 134,000 is a good thing IMO.

Not your usual slashdotting

[jbeamon]

This guy's nameservers are down. It's not that the webserver is down; you can browse it by the IP address listed in his whois information. It's that the webserver has a default Apache start page as its default and his domain as a vhost, but none of his nameservers are up to resolve requests for his domain.

I'm amazed not only that so many posts were made "about" the story from various diagonal points of view, but without anyone actually browsing his site. It's even more interesting that his story got posted at all without the referenced content being reachable. I read a great story once at a web site that's no longer up; maybe I should post it!

Re:Not your usual slashdotting

[0BoDy]

you can add the hostname and theip to /etc/hosts (linux) or search for hosts in hidden and system files on your windows drive and add it there, that will give you a way to resolv the hostname to the ip and properly access the vhost

Re:Not your usual slashdotting

[jbeamon]

Y'know, that's fascinating, but I'm just not THAT eager to read the original articles from which /. posts are made. Thanks for adding the tip, though. That was a good call on your part.

Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[reporter]

The search engine at Micro$oft (M$) currently has indexed about 1 billion web pages, but Google has indexed several times that amount. Given time, M$ will eventually index more pages. Eventually, M$ will catch up.

The current barrier to entering the market for search engines is low. The technology is relatively simple as the multitude of search-engine companies will attest.

The advantage that M$ has, over Google, is its huge R&D budget. M$ labs is the modern-day equivalent of the venerable Bell Laboratories, which is shriveling under the management of Lucent. M$ has plucked numerous professors from the computer science departments at top universities by offering incredibly high salaries.

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[drsquare]

I think the main difference between MSN and Google is that Google has a massive market share, and is trusted a lot more than Microsoft. Microsoft have benefited hugely in the past from 'already being there', and now they will find out that Google is 'already there', and people won't generally see the need to switch to another search engine, least of all the Microsoft one, unless there's a massive benefit to switching. Offering fewer sites and giving biased search results don't really count as a benefits.

As for R&D, I'm not convinced that's too important in search engines. Most people don't care one jot about search engine algorithms, they just go to the search engine they always go to, whether a rival site might be more optimised or might give slightly more relevent results. The main things Microsoft can spend their money on are:
1) Marketing.
2) Marketing.
3) Marketing.

You might bitch and moan about how they should be concentrating on features and result-relevency, but in the real (business) world, the main concern is success, and success comes from market-share, and market-share comes from mind-share, and mind-share comes from marketing and brand-recognition, or plain old-fashioned monopolistic tricks.

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Marketing.
2) Marketing.
3) Marketing. huh??

whens the last time you saw a AD about a MS product?

last one i've seen has been Halo 2, MS dont advertise for much else, so im quite sure they dont spend all their money on that

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[Loacher]

There is a difference between marketing and advertising,
advertising is just one of the many tools of marketing.

Marketing consists of finding out what the people you want to sell to want,
even if they the people don't know they want it, and delivering.

If Microsoft's target market wanted safe, standards compliant, customizable
browsers, that is what Microsoft would deliver. Too bad we are not their target.

e.g. When the mass of people Microsoft caters to started getting tired of popups,
adware and spyware, they started getting solutions elswhere. Microsoft's
marketing department noticed, and we now have IE's pop-up blocker and Microsoft Anti-Spyware.

R&D cost for blocker and antispyware: $0 (Just copy other browsers, or buy it from Giant)
Marketing cost: $Millions (Who has not heard of it? How many press releases and covert publicity?)

And to stay in topic, how many grannys, Joe Sixpacks, stupid managers, etc... care wether Britney's pictures come from 3 or 2.5 million different sources? They just want their pictures NOW!

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[ravee]

reporter(666905) said:
"The advantage that M$ has, over Google, is its huge R&D budget. "
--
Today's news said Google had raked in money which exceeded by many times its expectations - to the tune of several millions in advertising revenues alone. And it has a share base of more than a billion. So money is not a problem as far as Google is concerned.

reporter(666905) also said:
"M$ has plucked numerous professors from the computer science departments at top universities by offering incredibly high salaries."
--
True. But Google also has its share of scientists who are busy bringing out inovations. "Google News" being an excellent example. http://news.google.com

ravee
--
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[sridharinfinity]

The search engine at Micro$oft (M$) currently has indexed about 1 billion web pages

Really? A search for 'microsoft sucks' listed www.microsoft.com right on the first page!

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[K-boy]

I actually prefer the results the MSN gives at the moment. That's doesn't mean it's any better - all it means is that no one has started targeting it like they do Google or Yahoo.

MSN is a search engine virgin at the moment. If it became important, then comes the real challenge - trying to keep one step ahead of efforts to bend the results. That is where the real search engine battle lies. And, let's be honest, Google is the master of algorithms.

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The advantage that M$ has, over Google, is its huge R&D budget.

Not really. Their advantage is that they have a monopoly consumer OS's. They will bundle their search with their OS, which is already bundled with their browser and their media player. Most users will never think to install something better, or go to google when their is a search already built in. It does not have to be as good as Google. It does not have to be close. It only has to be functional enough to barely work for most people's searches. It can return only 1/3 of the results Google does and have 10 times the ads and lack most of the cool features. All that it has to do is return basic results for the top 1K searches and it will win. You can't beat a monopoly's bundling without a vastly better system for the average user.

Think of it this way. If the telephone company gave out free cheese with every phone bill, what would happen to cheese sellers? Most would have to stop selling cheese. Maybe the phone company's cheese is not as good, but if it is not terrible, most people won't go buy more cheese from somewhere else. There will always be cheese and computer aficionados that will pay to get the best, but that is only about 5% of the market. The rest goes to the monopoly (which is why what MS is doing was made illegal in the first place).

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[fshalor]

When they add the search button to only link (or automatically, same thing) to m$earch, then it's over for google. At least for all the people who don't know any better.

M$ will make it one click eaisier to use m$earch in stead of any other search, and it will matter.

But google will be here for quite a while.

I seriously couldn't do my job without google. It is by far, the best tool I've ever had. I tried about 10-30 searches in m$ (all of which gave me the info on top 3-4 of page 1 in google), I had to go several pages to find pseuro related sites. (and half of the searches didn't find what I needed with the simple search terms.)

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[Thud457]

You ignoramus! Microsoft Sucks is a well-known brand for vertical-integration sexworker software suites. It's the stripped-down lightweight option to the market-leading Microsoft Brothel.

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people don't care one jot about search engine algorithms, they just go to the search engine they always go to, whether a rival site might be more optimised or might give slightly more relevent results.

Within limits. Google crushed Altavista because of its vastly superior algorithms, not marketing. If MSN were to manage a similar algorithmic quantum leap over Google, that would help them a lot. That said, it's true that it isn't clear that this is possible at search engines' current level of refinement.

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[siplus]

I see MS ads all the time. they don't advirtise any "thing," just MS in general. They spout off something about they are letting you grow to your portential or similar bullshit A few years ago when i took High school Calculus, I noticed that one MS comerical showed calc problems on the blackboard in a classroom that didn't even have a computer in it...

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[mangu]

The search engine at Micro$oft (M$) currently has indexed about 1 billion web pages, but Google has indexed several times that amount.

*Yawn*. Spam companies send more than a billion emails a day from a basement. How many days should it take for a corporation with Microsoft's resources to index a few billion web pages?

Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft

[EvilJoker]

I see ads for MS crap all the time. Last time I remember seeing it was an ad right here on /.

First Poster Has Only 400?

[Master of Transhuman]

"I personally dont think that Britney would have more than 10k pictures online (or may be offline too?)" (from the review)

At last count I have 2,347 pictures of Britney Spears.

And I don't even like her music...:-)

I wonder how many photos of the Corrs MSN can find...I've got 2,080 photos of them...

How about 1,228 of Salma Hayek?

1,406 of Angelina Jolie?

1,083 of Carmen Electra?

24 of Chelsea Clinton? Waitaminnit, WTF?

Bug in MSN Search Feedback

[Phoe6]

Try to provide a Feedback. It does not proceed. I tried to provide MSN a Feedback about there is noway to get to the main page after searching. Pops up a Windows BOX containing Submission information and gives up. btw, I use Firefox and I bother not to check for the same on IE.

Re:Bug in MSN Search Feedback

[Master of Transhuman]

No feedback for reporting bugs in a Microsoft product?

Wow, there's a surprise!

After, "security is a priority", according to Bill the other day...

Guess that means the best security in the Microsoft world is "Don't wanna hear it!"

Konqueror said .....

[ajs318]

An error occurred while attempting to run a script on this page.
http://www.msn.com/ line 149:
TypeError: Attempt at calkling a function that expects a HTMLDocument on a Window.

Quick comparison

[killmenow]

Just did a quick comparison of search.msn.com, google.com and www.yahoo.com. Here are my results:

Search term: microsoft sucks
Google: results about 862,000
Yahoo: results about 762,000
MSN: results about 1,856,364

There's a joke in there somewhere dying to get out.

Re:Quick comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

I just did a search of "Linux sucks" on Google and got 1,042,000 hits!

The search sex may return sexually explicit conten

[statixz]

For the fact that I'm surfing from Singapore, clicking on the link on the parent post leads me to http://search.msn.com.sg/results.aspx?q=sex&FORM=Q BRE which returns: "The search sex may return sexually explicit content. To get results, change your search terms. Didn't get the results you expected? Help us improve."

Its unusable

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it unusable, the local weighting is so strong that you get local results regardless of the language your searching with or what your searching for.

Search .NET and you don't get a Microsoft site, you get nothing but French pages in France. Switch to English language setting and you get English pages for French sites.

Connect through a Spanish ISP and you get Spanish ones.

For example .NET comes up as this in Spain:
1. www.lobocom.es/regdom.html
2. www.clikear.com
3. www.clikear.com/aspnet
4. mexico.clikear.com
5. www.empleo.net
6. www.ciberaula.com/curso/masteraspnet
7. www.ciberaula.com/curso/puntonet
8. venezuela.clikear.com
9. ecuador.clikear.com
10. www.filipenses.net

No mention of Microsoft and 2,3,4,8,9 are all parts of the same site!

Search for "Marseille by Night", Google gives you sites about the nightlife of Marseille. MSN gives me:
1. www.maketon.com/conciertos.php
A concert by a DJ called "Dj Jack de Marseille"
2. www.fyl.uva.es/~wgeolid/fajg/solidario/forosocial/ index.html
About volunteers working NIGHT and day and having a meeting in MARSEILLE.
3. www.infoconciertos.com
Again it mentions a concert in MARSEILLE and a DJ playing at Gomma NIGHT.

Its all complete crap, absolute crap, its not turfing to say it, these results suck big time. They are no even in the same league as Google, Yahoo and the rest.

Relevance filtering

[YU Nicks NE Way]

What a wierd result. I don't think it's a "sponsored link" effect, though. It looks, instead, like the ordering algorithm clusters sites, so that sites with lots of pictures of Spears show up near the front, and sites with fewer images show up later. If you hack the query to look at pages around 200, you find many more sources on each page.

Semantic Searches

[Anonymous Coward]

It is interesting to compare the results of
"black inkjet refill" "next day delivery" visa usa
between google and msn. MSN returns 1 page, and google returns 10. Surely there are more than 11 places on the net that could satisfy the request, but neither search engine does a reasonable job with semantics.

Britany appears under camel toe

[MCRocker]

Yeah, but if you take out the 'kelly ripa' and just search under 'camel toe' you do get some hits. The eerie thing is that Britney Spears somehow manages to make it into the first page of these search results too!

Though, as if to prove your original point, adding 'britney' to that search also gets no results.

P.S. You'll almost certainly like cameltoe.bolt.com

Re:Britany appears under camel toe

[Anonymous Coward]

Cameltoes: OMFG! Women have vaginas even when they're wearing clothes!

Another comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

On Monday I used Google search, on a whim, to search for one topic in my PhD thesis. I got some useful results in the top 10, particularly links to another researcher who I was not aware of.

I tried the same search in MSN search on Tuesday. I got different results, though nothing so useful to me as the result from Google. Then again, search engines are not exactly my first tool for finding the kinds of resources I happened upon in my Google search. Overall I would use MSN search again, if my search from Google came up empty.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=synapse
ht tp://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH& srch_type=0&q=synapse

Re:This doesn't help me ***Not work safe***

[Samus]

Better wait to look at this one when you are at home.

It's obvious what they're doing...

[thegnu]

Microsoft just indexes the search results from the Google and Yahoo image searches. It then leaves them with about 200,000 results to dig up on their own, which they can get from their sponsors.

I'm not really being serious... or AM I!!??

Re:It's obvious what they're doing...

[VB]

Not according to my logs:

9943 17.58% msnbot/0.3 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
6398 11.31% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/
6105 10.79% YahooSeeker/1.2 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; yahooseek
1674 2.96% Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
1664 2.94% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.co
1523 2.69% msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Looks like msn comes by quite a bit.

Britney?

[Anonymous Coward]

That just isn't a best example for research, since this term is very competitive, so the results are bound to be heavily manipulated by search engine optimizers. One cannot draw any meaningfull conclusions from such "research".

Re:Maybe I am being dense but....

[Anonymous Coward]

She's hot, right?

If skanky whores are your idea of 'hot', then yes, I suppose she is.

Funny sight on MSN image search

[ZakMcCracken]

Click here

Microsoft business model

[dustmite]

Those of us who've been around a while know the well-worn pattern:

(1) MS sits on arse for years doing no innovation while another company produces an innovative, excellent, useful product and spends several years refining it and making it even better

(2) Start to take notice as another company starts to get a lot of limelight in some mainstream market "space" it never occurred to you to enter

(3) Announce intention to compete.

(4) Spend the next couple of years with half-hearted attempt to play catch-up, producing a mediocre equivalent that's not really even terribly good. After a few hit-and-miss betas, announce "version 1" with much fanfare and lots of fawning press releases, with a product that basically brings customers what was already available five years ago from the innovative competitor, blatantly copied down to detailed elements of the user interface but it 'feels' like 'just a poor clone'

(5) Spend another couple of years watching in frustration at low adoption rates of your product. Slowly improve product until it meets a "good enough" standard (still not as good as competitors, but "good enough"), and then ...

(6) ... shove it down customers' throats by abusing desktop OS monopoly: Integrate own product into the next version of Windows so tightly that people almost have to use it, e.g. put MSN search box right into taskbar thus making it far less convenient to use other search engines.

(7) Gain market share rapidly. Fawning press hails you as a great innovator. Ten years later, everyone thinks you practically pioneered Internet searching.

Will it work this time? Probably.

Mark my words, Longhorn will have an MSN search box built into the taskbar.

Search for Christina Aguilera

[Abalamahalamatandra]

She's hotter anyway, and currently winning in the sluttiness race.

4,203 results from all over the place.

The important question...

[ballsanya]

How many pictures do they have of your girlfriend....wait...

Re:The important question...

[Anonymous Coward]

That brings up the philosophical question of the ages:
"What does imagination look like?"

Re:The important question...

[Master of Transhuman]

Right - not a problem...

Quick comparisson

[dogfull]

Google vs MSN
Bubble sort
G - A usefull site
M - A portal

Abiword crash copying
G - the correct site with the bug report
M - no helpfull site

The cure
G - www.thecure.com
M - msn music & ringtone site

All in all MSN search looks nice but performs dissapointing.

Btw, how to change it so it will search in international sites first instead of just dutch sites?

Just Tried "The Corrs"

[Master of Transhuman]

Found 1,474 images...

Including some I never saw before...

And yes, a lot of the images link to 404 pages, but I've seen that on Google, too.

Re:Just Tried "The Corrs"

[Anonymous Coward]

I think some Corrs lyrics fit this situation well.

"Now something has entered my mind...shattering all of my thoughts. It's no good it's just one big waste of my time..."

Fuzzy Searching

[digitalgimpus]

I don't think it does fuzzy searching as well.

Looking through various search queries in Google and MSN I noticed that Google finds images in pages that barely make a mention to the keyword (and does it accurately). MSN on the other hand the pages have more references to the keyword I am searching for.

I'm not sure why this is, I guess it's just the alor. they use to index.

I'm betting MSN will improve a bit, it takes a while to index the net to the level that Google did. It takes a long while.

I'll be saving a few queries, and comparing them over time, and see how the change. I'm guessing in 6 months the query results will be fairly different.

He didn't turn off domain grouping

[Punchinello]

I searched for keywords britney spears and randomly checked few pages upto page number 20 and found that the 400 images were only from 3 domains :| 5in9.com, celebritypicturesarchive.com and nabou.com.

Perhaps this guy didn't know the default setting on MSN search is to group results by domain. Maybe he should try agian with this setting off if he wants to see more variety of domains providing Britney pics.

Re:He didn't turn off domain grouping

[MarkByers]

Turning off domain grouping doesn't seem to make a difference for me. The same results are returned.

Re:He didn't turn off domain grouping

[KillerDeathRobot]

Turning off domain grouping doesn't seem to make a difference for me. The same results are returned.

It made a slight difference for me, but turning off the safesearch filter actually produced a bigger variety, and most of the added images were not porn.

Re:He didn't turn off domain grouping

[tepples]

Perhaps this guy didn't know the default setting on MSN search is to group results by domain.

Same with Google, but Google by default hides all results after the second in a given domain, giving a "Read More..." link to view only one domain's results.

try bill gates

[combcox]

MSN
and check out the 6th picture.

google
This time its the first

MSN Advert code borks dutch IT site

[Anonymous Coward]

www.tweakers.net ( a dutch /. ripoff) has currently totally been borked by the Microsoft advert banners... LOL!!

I, noticed, something, also,

[kaustik]

I noticed that, MSN's search had images from only a few sites.

I, noticed, that, Slashdot, does, not, check, grammar, in, submissions,
,
,

Explicit embedded metadata being ignored

[maggard]

What continues to surprise me is how image searches ignore the information embedded in images. EXIF & IPTC (& NewsML) all have fields for author, caption, longitude & latitude, keywords, etc. Yet none of the search engines appear to pay any attention to these.

Many pictures include this sort of search-rich information, either from the camera or added manually, using cataloging software. Google's Picasa 2 freeware (Windows only) embeds it's key words just so. Microsoft Research's excellent freeware (Windows only) World-Wide Media eXchange tools do the same for geo-coding photos. There are numerous other tools that can do the same, leading to a significent set of internally 'tagged' material.

So, why aren't the search engines taking advantage of this? They're already loading the images and creating thumbnails, how much extra work is it to extract any additional information in the file and use that in it's indexing too, especially compared to the potentially increased accuracy?

Re:Explicit embedded metadata being ignored

[l3v1]

So, why aren't the search engines taking advantage of this?

This is really quite simple to comprehend. To access all the data you mention one would need to fetch those images, extract the data, and build an indexed database of image locations+extracted data, indexed by the extracted information. That would require HUGE amounts of traffic and storage.

If one could do that, they would provide color, depth, object, etc. -based searching possibilties also. For many years to come these services remain at the level of single databases (image databases, movie and film databases, etc.), at organizations which can index their own data and provide searching capabilities. Which is nothing new.

Re:Explicit embedded metadata being ignored

[Chris Pimlott]

Yet clearly Google Images already goes out and retrieves each individual image - after all, they have to generate the thumbnails.

Re:Explicit embedded metadata being ignored

[maggard]

So, why aren't the search engines taking advantage of this?

This is really quite simple to comprehend. To access all the data you mention one would need to fetch those images, extract the data, and build an indexed database of image locations+extracted data, indexed by the extracted information. That would require HUGE amounts of traffic and storage.

Wow - you mean...

Exactly what search engines DO?!!

How the freak do you think Yahoo!, Google, MSN et al generate their current image lookups? The content isn't provided by "organizations which can index their own data and provide searching capabilities"; this is the service search engines provide.

They crawl the web, index the html (& pdf & doc & xml & xls & etc.), slurp the photos in & generate thumbnails, then use the indexed information to pull up pages of likely thumbnails based on your search. And yeah, it "require(s) HUGE amounts of traffic and storage."

So, with l3v1's utterly amazing cluelessness aside, does anyone with a lick of sense have any ideas why the engines aren't sucking the EXIF/IPTC metadata out of the images they're already pulling down & thumbnailing?

Re:Explicit embedded metadata being ignored

[quaxzarron]

I am guessing that is because most photographs dont have their metadata "filled in". And where your camera/capture program does it automatically, I guess it will be something as descriptive as 'DSC00101' or '11102004_mytrip'.

Re:Explicit embedded metadata being ignored

[maggard]

You're right - probably 90% of images have lens and flash settings, mebbe a copyright, nothing else.

But the percentage with more information is growing. Already there are cameras with GPS in them, and GPS-track-to-photo-correlation software has been around a couple of years. Plus there's all of those images with the keywords, titles, and other information filled in by cataloging programs, personal & professional.

Any of that information is gonna be interesting to a search engine. Indeed it's likely to be better quality information the the html surrounding the image and this is information that is part of it.

Pulling out the data is trivial. The extra cycles are almost nothing. The storage is a fraction of everything else that is being indexed along with the image. And so if 90% are duds, the 10% are still gonna be gold. So, even with a 10% 'hit' rate, isn't it worth indexing this along with everything else?

It's not the index, but the technology differs

[camcorder]

I just want to speculate over the technology both search engines use. Specially for image search engines. When you search for a picture, and use 'monkey' for example for search key. You will see pictures with names that does not include monkey in it even at first page of Google search results. That's because Google using context reference for images *better*. But for MSN you won't see any pictures on that so called first 20 pages that does not have 'monkey' in file name.

So basically MSN search engine puts files w/ search key in name at high priority. That's why it's showing pictures at same domain until names with britney spears ends.

MSN search might be a good service for msn users but it's nowhere to race with google either with search index and technology. But you know MS and his strategy, IE was like a silly program and had not even 10% market share at its first year. Thanks to MS and his monopol strategy it's now %90 and we got a full of garbage web.

Smart image search

[elcastigador]

Why don't you try this one for a change..

RSS feed?

[mopower70]

href="results.aspx?q=britney+spears&format=rss&FOR M=ZZRE"

Anyone got any idea why they'd have an RSS feed at the bottom of the page? I'm sure there is one, but I'm having a hard time coming up with a practical reason for monitoring the content of a search engine result.

Photo of Gates and MSN Search Team

[Sundroid]

My blog, "Kitchen Sink Gazette", http://sundroid.blogspot.com/ has a link to a site where you'll find a photo of Bill Gates and the entire MSN Search Team and a list of news articles about MSN Search.

SafeSearch

[Shardin]

I hope MS doesn't try and copyright "SafeSearch" and make google change the language in their settings. Conversely, I wonder if Google has it copywrit.

Also, Anyone else notice the "Location" setting on MSN? I wonder how this is effecting our "scientific research"

Interesting search rank

[peterprior]

Personally I'm just pleased I'm 1st for 'fuck microsoft' :)

Grouping Image Results Bug

[ClickNMix]

This just looks like a bug, plain and simple - If you go to settings, there is an option to group images from the same site - checked by default - but taking it off has no effect, so if one site such as in this case has ALOT of images, its going to be a long way before you get onto the next site. Which you can pretty easy.

Everything about this article is just based on one dumb luck search, and not alot else it seems. Sure it's Microsoft, so it's easy to get all het up, where as if Google made the same mistake, everyone would be much more likely to try figure out what the real deal was.

Re:BOYCOTT THE ENGINE UNTIL GATES FIXES SECURITY

[faragon]

Take it easy, my fine friend. I have no time to lose by using MS products, simply I don't need them. If MS wants to enhance his products, better they pay for it, while deciding which betatest for free, I do that related to open source initiatives.

Related Joke

[sameerdesai]

Reminds me of a joke.

A scientist is conducting experiments on cockroach behavior. First day he cuts off one leg of a cockroaach and shouts walk. The cockroach is able to walk limpily. Second day he cuts off the second leg and shouts walk. The cockroach is still able to move around. Third day he cuts off his third leg and shouts walk. The cockroach tries hard to move and is able to do that. Fourth day he cuts off his last leg and shouts walk and obviously cockroach is unable to move. The conclusion: When you cut all the four legs of a cockroach the cockroad goes deaf!!!

Re:Related Joke

[l3v1]

Bad joke, and if it wasn't, it's still not a good association with the story here.

Reminds me of a joke.

Reminds me of a roommate back at the university who got reminded of a joke every now and then, and all of them were really bad.

Forget Britney (sp?) How about yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually do my first test of search engines by searching for myself. I'm much more interesting than Ms. Spears.

For image search on my name, MSN search returns only one lone picture of me and a large organ. (Though it's not from a gallery site, so the hypothesis that msn image search only knows a few gallery sites is false.)

Google search, returns 182 images. That's a little bit better.

Re:Forget Britney (sp?) How about yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! You're all over the Internet!

OVERTURE

[sloveless]

All of the sponsored sites are Overture links. Do the same search at Overture and compare the results. Also, compare the search tool bar itself at yahoo.com with msn.com. Built from the ground up, my ass. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/01/125923 5&tid=109

Judging..

[Enevitable]

Judging by microsofts tactics, the results that show have probably paid microsoft to display their results. Microsoft products working well.. and free... that is impossible

Don't click this at work....

[Anonymous Coward]

I only need one search engine! www.sexloupe.com

Wheeeeeeee

Re:Don't click this at work....

[Anonymous Coward]

but what about a good site with movies? come on hook a geek up

IOP

[Anonymous Coward]

This may suprise you, but the GoogleBot doesn't actually look at the pictures =o

So it doesn't matter either way...

Microsoft can't count

[Hard-Format]

Just to play I did a search for my web site "homelessirc", it had about 4 pages worth of hits. So, I start looking through the 4 pages of hits and was rather disapointed to find that most of the results were duplicates from the same page or very very closely related pages (the sort of hits google would filter out automatically).

Then when I hit the third page I noticed that there were now magically 7 pages of results. So I looked back at the other pages, and their page counter jumps between 4, 5, 7 and back down to 4.

further grumblings about poorly copying google's home page....

Interesting Conclusion

[jyak]

Setting up to two pages, one on a MS host and the other on a Linux host, I noticed that google will only find the linux webpage and the MSN search only finds the MS hosted webpage (created in MS publisher). To me, the results in the MSN search seem to provide results for servers/hosts using MS products. I wonder what the real truth is behind all this...

YAFM

[Anonymous Coward]

I am fairly sure MS developed thier search engine based around finding actual information and not for you to jerk off too.

Not a defense of MSN (since I haven't used it yet and wouldn't know), but if your basis of search engine quality is finding pictures of Britney Spears, you're a fucking moron.

From what I've been told...

[LordPixie]

It's not the size of a msn's cache that matters, but how they use it...


--LordPixie

Re:Related Joke - OT

[druxton]

You may want to tweak this joke a little. You know a cockroach is an insect, right? How many legs does an insect have?

"Failing to neglect their need"?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE debacle, where Microsoft played catch-up to Netscape and other existing browsers after failing to neglect thier need in earlier years.

Don't tell me. You were raised in a cave by lawyers.

Languages

[Anonymous Coward]

PS.. I notice there are different language settings.. do you suppose MS will offer translation services?

Probably not to the extent that Google does. And I note that MSN search offers far fewer language settings.

But will it solve the mystery of...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.liquidgeneration.com/poptoons/britneys_ breasts.asp

/.'ed already

[adeydas]

Hey Gaurav, you just /.'ed your own site. anyways i have a similar one too at http://deydas.com/archives/2005/02/01/the-all-new- msn-search-a-review/19/.

Perhaps you should use msn.com not co.uk

[cybrthng]

Compare apples to apples buddy :)

Search for Bill gates on the search.msn.com and www.google.com and the results are very similar.

Re:Perhaps you should use msn.com not co.uk

[traffi]

Using MSN, searching for "bill gates" returns the mabus anti-christ page in first place in the .uk domain and second place in the .com domain.

Using Google, his homepage appears in first place on both domains.

I agree that I should have used .co.uk or .com in both searches, but I get the sneaking suspicion that the positive result on search.msn.com might be the result of some adventurous if statement ;)

I'd check out MSN if I could

[CranberryKing]

type 'lawn darts' and hit Enter: gives (my)firefox a segmentation fault. :0

Blattidae have six legs

[blueZ3]

So there's definitely something funny going on with these two-legged roaches that don't move...

Retard...You forgot how they achieved their place

[Anonymous Coward]

"Internet Explorer: Played catch-up to Netscape, caught it up, then overtook it. Now it's the world's widest-used and most well-known browser"

Hence the main reason for 90% of all ad/mal/spy/ware
Gee thanks.

"Modern Desktop GUI: Yes they were playing catch-up with Apple, who in turn got the concept from Xerox, but they worked on the idea and now they have practically the whole desktop market saturated so much that even a possibly technically-superior free operating system struggles to get a foothold."

Yes, by using un-ethical draconian methods to insure a larger install base. Made possible by
their un-ethically created monopoly. Niiice.

"Office products? Yes they may have been created by other companies, but Microsoft took them, and all 'Clippy' jokes aside, they turned it into a very decent product and it's dominated the market, and the 'other companies' are languishing on the sidelines."

Indeed. By ensuring their standards were closed to
all and making sure (again) that it was pre-installed
on the majority of machines, again through draconian,
un-ethical manipulation of a monopoly situation.
Way to go yet again.

In the real world, when you create something really
innovative, Microsoft will take it and corrupt it.

Google needs to put a huge push on firefox now

[codepunk]

You know darn well they are gonna integrate msn search into Longhorn. If google pushes the hell out
of firefox to gain the search bar on the desktop then stand a chance os staying in the game. They had better get going or they will be in the long line of monopoly victims.

why?

[Mr. Underbridge]

Come on, at least give us a story. Was it because he was a sniveling fuckwit? Because of his constant and annoying tendency to editorialize on story summaries? Or because he was embezzeling from OSDN?

Come on, I MUST KNOW!

MSN Search = cheap(er)

[EvilStein]

Literally. I've seen it. I had a contract there. Racks and racks and racks of 2U dual processor boxes from Rackable Systems, as opposed to the countless HP boxes & Sun boxes. (Yes, Microsoft has a LOT of Sun hardware in production!)

I don't know if they run Linux, because we (the data center peeps) didn't have access to any of them, only the Rackable Systems people did.

They sure did have a lot of blinking lights. :-)

WHy it will not work this time

[SuperKendall]

In order for it to work, MSN would have to be the default search engine from the desktop.

Two problems - the first is that most people will just type "google" and reach the site that way.

The second is that Spyware will not let MSN stand as the default search engine, instead redirecting people to ad-laden search sites even from default search boxes in the browser.

I think it's the whole reaosn MS is fighting spyware as hard as they are (buying that company) because it's actually threatening an aspect of lockin.

Re:WHy it will not work this time

[dustmite]

In order for it to work, MSN would have to be the default search engine from the desktop.

Of course, that is precisely what will happen, that is the idea. Also, I don't know if you have used Google's desktop search (very good BTW) .. it will work the same way, it will quickly search both online and your own computer and show the results in the same page. It will be "the" computer's search box. (Again, not innovative, but copying.) Some more ideas that they could and probably will do is integrate it into other applications like MS Word .. want to search for more info on any word, just right-click and "Web search" and it'll open MSN (like Firefox's right-click "web search" function). Same with Outlook. By integrating a direct link into basically into every major application (which is not hard) it will be just too damn convenient to not use. And of course they'll make it technically hard to change the default search from MSN to Google, in a way that results in basically only 5% of people actually bothering to do it in the end.

Two problems - the first is that most people will just type "google" and reach the site that way.

I actually doubt it. By 2006, if MSN is producing "good enough" search results, most people will not do that extra step for 20 or 30% more accurate search results.

I think it's the whole reaosn MS is fighting spyware as hard as they are (buying that company) because it's actually threatening an aspect of lockin.

Yup! They are taking spyware seriously, because it's threatening them on multiple fronts at the moment. Longhorn, while it will have security problems still, will be more secure and resistant to spyware than today's rubbish. As usual with Microsoft it's a defensive, re-active move though, not a pro-active one, as they do not innovate. What bothers me about all of it is how far behind it holds computing, every time they do this, they effectively slow the whole industry down by 5 - 10 years. Windows is like a time-machine, when you're using it, you're basically using 10-year old tech, except somehow it requires a 100 times more powerful computer to do the same stuff that you could have done 10 years ago on a competitor's system (e.g. remote desktop, yay, brings, what, 15-year old tech to Windows XP?). I sometimes wonder how far we'd be by now if it weren't for them. When you use "integrated MSN search" in 2006/7/8, you'll be using something "nearly as good" as Google was in, say, 2000.

What Google should be doing today if they don't want to be 'the new Netscape' is already start implementing things like search from right-clicking on words in Word, Outlook etc., basically making it conveniently and quickly accessible from just about anywhere in Windows that anyone might want to search. Yet actually I don't think Google can succeed, sadly, because MS has too much power to lock anyone out of the areas of the system that they need to dominate.

Google not as technically advanced as you think

[Anonymous Coward]

The search engine at Micro$oft (M$) currently has indexed about 1 billion web pages, but Google has indexed several times that amount.

That's what Google would like you to believe. In fact for the past year Google has been unable to index new websites because of space limitations. They will add the url, but will not add the keywords to their keyword hash. The even mention this limitation in their prospectus:

"We may have difficulty scaling and adapting our existing architecture to accommodate increased traffic and technology advances or changing business requirements, which could lead to the loss of users, advertisers and Google Network members, and cause us to incur expenses to make architectural changes."

Check out:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/27578-3 0-10.h tm

...and it installed spyware on my computer!

[brw12]

I opened IE, clicked on the britney search link (ahem) and... the photo sites installed spyware! Unbelievable.

MSN Search = Bad URL

[cyxxon]

I don't know, but when the last Slashdot article about MSN Search came up, I tried it out just to see what the fuzz was about. And one thing immediately struck me: the site's URL is to complicated. I mean, compare www.google.com to search.msn.com - there isn't even a 'www' in MSN's URL (and I don't mean that as funny, Joe Sixpack usually adds a 'www' to any URL thrown at him because 'that is how the internet works').

I guess it is the same with this as it is with "The Internet" (you know, the blue "e" on the Windows desktop launching IE) or "computers" (these TV like things where you can write letters with this Windows thing on it and a harddisk under the desk). "Google" today is already a synonym to searching on the web, and just by being superior in the results alone will not be enough to dethrone Google (and we are not even sure yet if MSN will be better).

Misleading example

[waltsj19]

While the search for Britney may show results from only 3 domains, this does not seem to be the norm. A search for "Lord of the Rings" returned 13 different domains in the first 20 pics alone (as did searches for "King Tut" and "Robin Yount"). The difference is that those 3 domains for Britney are domains that basically exist for the purpose of providing celebrity pics. Hence, they will tend to dominate that search.

Personally, I like the image portion of M$N Search and find it to be extremely accurate in finding relevant images (and it really is hard for me to admit that I like something that M$ has developed).

their bots just got started

[notchcode]

Not that my site is the center of the universe, but my logs tell me msn only just started looking at my pages a few days ago. That migh thave something to do with the incomplete results...

msn firefox search plugins

[sreid]

try msn firefox search plugins on

msn

and

google

the MSN result makes no sence compared to googles

so why get the puggin?

Another anomaly......

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember this?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/11 /172422 1&tid=109&tid=217

Looks like that might really be the case. It's been known for some time that a fluke of Google is that a search for 'miserable failure' turns up George W. Bush's biography.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/32 98443.stm

Just out of curiosity, I tried the same search on MSN. Guess what? :)

EXIF data...

[seanvaandering]

What would be really good is for them to capture the EXIF data in JPG files and index based on that or find a way to incorporate it. Yes, for a file named &!^@%#!!!!!.jpg to show up in a Britney Spear's image search is redicilous.

excellent

[Smobien]

dustmite, you couldn't have said it better.

DNS down

[nstrom]

Both DNS servers for gsharma.com seem to be down at the moment, or at least not responding properly to DNS requests. Web site's still up, though -- if you're having problems, add the following to your hosts file:

207.58.133.70 www.gsharma.com

Decent product ?? Office ??

[Anonymous Coward]

1 Gb RAM + 2 Gb swap = Out of memory in Excel, the xls-file is 7 Mb... Decent ? CRAP... ...or try a table that spans several pages in Word... CRASH...

Get a Life, I've never had this kind of problems i 123 or WordPro...

MSN search is biased

[spot]

I tried searching for "draves" with the new
msn search. It gives rather different
results from all other search engines. My
brother works for microsoft and has a home
page hosted on their site. My home page is
draves.org.

Google, yahoo, altavista, dogpile, and
lycos all return my page as #1 and my
brother's page at microsoft as #4, #13, or
greater than #30. MSN returns my brother's
page as #1 and mine as #4.

What do you make of that (besides that i'm
an egoist)? I would conclude that MSN
search inflates the ranking of results from
microsoft.com.

Who modded this insightful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet Explorer and Office have never been superior to the competition nor will they ever be. They only dominate because Joe Average does not know about the superior alternatives.

Newbie bugs?

[Madarco]

It isn't very important, i know, but there's still some bugs in the results page. One i've notice is the wrong enumeration of the pages. If you search "abababa" you'll find 25 pages full of results, but it show you 28. try: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=abababa&first =231&count=10&FORM=PERE4 and click on 28, you'll go only to 25.

And all the same chick too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Worst porn site EVER!

What is success?

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft has never put out a successful piece of software. Every one of them has bitten me (and anyone who actually wants to get real work done) in one way and another with unfulfilled promises.

Money may be useful as a way to represent value, but only if everyone agrees to use it that way. Using money to trade value and using it to play power games are mutually contradictory activities.

site recommends google

[Anonymous Coward]

Try searching for "microsoft sucks" the first response states ... is just a very small sampling of the pages around the world that already have the title Microsoft Sucks . A much more extensive and up-to-date list can by generated by going to Google and searching for ...

Missing results

[Anonymous Coward]

Search for Rotten (or even Rotten.com).... No results for rotten.com.... What should be the #1 result can't be found?