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

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?

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...

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.

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: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

[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.