Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.
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.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
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.
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.
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.
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel... But it was just someone with a flashlight bringing more work.
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.
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
Linux Help
for all things on Linux