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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.
I already have all 400 of those.
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!!
I'm a big tall mofo.
... that's why I love science. You can find the best reasons to do the weirdest things ... ;-)
..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.
So, did you turn it off before the search? I did.
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 searched for "britney spears nude goat dildo sparcstation" and didn't find a single thing.
I'm going to have to perform this experiment myself.
In the interest of the truth, you know.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
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
http://mirrordot.com/stories/5defdb2c0e9cac7c89624 a2594f96717/index.html
mirrordot doesn't seem to have archived all the images yet though...
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!
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
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.
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?
"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?"
I think I'll stop here.
...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®...
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
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.
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.
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!
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
what about "natalie portman naked petrified hot grits"?
Would you rather the author did an image search on RMS?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
Treo + Kaffi = Traffi
MSN Search
... Last Updated: Monday, January 31, 2005 - 12:00 A.M. Pacific Time Manage
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
* www.microsoft.net
I'm amazed how stupid and desperate these guys there must be.
To Turn off SafeSearch:
E HP
goto:
http://search.msn.com
click settings:
[Which will bring you to:]
http://search.msn.com/settings.aspx?ru=%2f&FORM=S
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?
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!
-j
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.
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.
Senthil
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
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Better wait to look at this one when you are at home.
In Republican America phones tap you.
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".
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.
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.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
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?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
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.
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!!!
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
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).