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Can Microsoft Beat Google?
An anonymous reader writes "With all the hype surrounding the recent release of MSN Search, are the search engine wars heating up? There's an interesting article that states, "As the veteran Microsoft enters the already flooded search engine industry, and Google still being fresh and refreshing to most people, it begs the question: can the old supplant the new?""
It will be just like how Microsoft beat AOL at the ISP game.
And just like Microsoft beat Sony in the game box market.
I have a friend who works on the MSN Search team as an intern. He said their marketing budget is massive. The article says that MS invested hundreds of millions of dollars, but I'm guessing most of that is for marketing - NOT the research and development that is needed to come up with a truly innovative search technology. If MS wants to win, they should focus on having a quality product, and not worry so much about promoting it. If they really do make something better, people will use it.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
google
(156 000 000 results)
versus
microsoft
(188 000 000 results)
The winner is: microsoft
Damn! I guess they can...
It's too late. Google is already a verb.
People will never say, "don't ask me, Microsoft it."
Am I missing something?
Also, MS has been in the search engine biz for years. Updating an interface hardly makes it buzzworthy.
I think ms will steal everything they can from google. are googles days numbered?
Seriously, I think 90% of the hype has been here on /.
As for overtaking, I don't think it will. They just aren't adding enough new value to make it worth breaking a 5 year long habit of typing google.com
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
IE didn't win the browser war as much as Netscape lost the browser war.
Simply put, Netscape sat on their laurels and watched as Microsoft yanked the rug out from under them. Yes, there was underhandedness involved, but at root, Netscape shoulders most of the blame for having lost the browser war.
Thus far, I don't see any indication that Google is going to repeat Netscape's mistakes. Google continues to run a service that is fast, reliable, and modern. They're aggressively broadening their service base, they've attained the pinnacle of name recognition, and they're not showing any signs of letting up.
Whatever comes, this will not be a simple rehash of Netscape vs. IE.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Microsoft's in an interesting position. They can't really take advantage of their OS they way they did to wipe out Netscape.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a web search added to the regular Windows search. Yes, I know they have a beta of desktop search too. I just don't think they'll be able to effectively pull it off.
I like google because I don't like to be bombarded with crap until after I push the search button.
Surely whoever beats Google is likely to have more power and information (or gain it later) than Google themselves? That would really solve your problem.
Google has a head-start, and are presently unencumbered by the bonehead marketers that have ensured that Microsoft produces such sloppy software.
In order to out-take Google, Microsoft would have to adopt it's strictly logical, scientific modus operandi.
Microsoft is a marketing company before a technology company. Google is the opposite. People will continue to use the best search engine, and MSN is not it.
Google frontpage: ~4KB HTML
MSN frontpage: umbteen kilobytes of clutter, flash, and totally irrelevant BS.
guess which one im gonna pull up for a simple web search.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Microsoft dominating Apple in the operating system market wasn't really a David and Goliath Battle.
Apple was essentially the Google of the early 80's to late 80's.
Google overcame many GREAT & Powerful names - the main being Yahoo and Lycos to come out on top.
Apple overcame Compaq/HP/IBM (for a while) and was at the 50% of all computers sold for a certain period of time and far greater % in education.
Microsoft has the muscle now and has always had the brute force or dominating power to overcome anyone they set their minds on.
That said, I think Google has the name - MSN Search just doesn't roll off the tongue.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
MSN Search topic has been regurgitated to the point of making me sick. Move on, give up on the issue. Do we really need 1-3 daily front page posts on MSN Search???? Lets restrict this to once a week, maybe.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
No, it raises the question.
There is a lot of room for improvement in today's search engines. Whoever helps people find the stuff they are looking for best, people will use them. That is how google won in the first place. I'm thinking the next step will be more along the lines of artificial intelligence moreso than pure number crunching.
search.msn.com is not a verb.
Put that in your pipe and Swiff(tm) it.
Errmmm... No. Then again, I live in Mountain View so I'm biased.
Google is attracting the talent M$ can only dream of. Somehow I doubt that they will manage to find any hardcore search geeks to develop new search apps for them. As far as search goes M$ are n00bs not the veterans and they won't be catching up. Their so called "new" search produces less relavant results than Yahoo and on top of that they are very vulnerable to manupulation by SEOs.
nice try, but no cigar.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
Because they feel the need to crawl web pages roughly 5 times as much as Google does. I swear their spider has nothing better to do with it's like than to visit my web page for some reason. I only have a few pages, and I get better than 50 hits a day just from the MS spider. Google seems to only hit each page once a day at most. I could see how that could get out of hand if you had a large site, with tons of pages.
Don't get me wrong, I am not worried about bandwidth because of the spider or anything, I just think they could tone down a little. Obviously if I were worried I could do something about it (maybe, depending on how nice it is).
No damn it. It doesnt beg the question. Begging the question is a logical falacy.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
"The power and information google has and will continue to imporve upon is scary."
Did you mean: improve
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Well to beat google M$ would have to leverage its monopoly on the desk top to gain a competitive advantage. They wouldn't do that; that's illegal.
Google is the next Alta Vista.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
Really, every popular search engine to date has had it's high points and its low points.
Something will beat our currently beloved Google eventually. Whether or not it's a good thing remains to be seen.
When it comes to search engines there are only two options to people: Google and everything else. The only people that will be using this are MSN users that get directed/re-directed to it by Microsoft.
Google only stands one chance or their lifespan is
limited to a year or two at best. They have to get
as much stuff on the desktop as they can because MS will integrate their search into the OS. They have got to push firefox now, they need to find a way to own a spot on everbodies desktop and right now firefox is the way to do that.
Got Code?
Just provide a viable alternative to google as hopefully others such as Yahoo will also do. It's really not in our interests for Google to monopolize searching.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Are you missing tags in there? I hope Microsoft gets the shit kicked out of em. Microsoft owns the world because of the populace's complacency with mediocrity and monopoly. And I for one love to see any instance of Microsoft losing in the business world. Not as satisfying as Bill taking a pie to the face though.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
the new MSN Search commercial?
It's kind of pathetic, I feel like they're begging you to use their search engine and then at the end, the Microsoft logo pops up, giving you that good old "We OWN YOU" feeling.
If they really do make something better, people will use it.
Not true. Marketing is everything these days. Why is Britney Spears popular? Quality product? hehe...
Marketing will get them their users, but users that don't know any better. For the tech crowd, yes, Microsoft will have to come up with a better product, though I find that just as amusing as Britney Spears selling records.
Web Design Tips
We the open source community have to stop Microsoft from obliterating yet another innovative website with their bottomless bank account and relentless aggression. Please sign this petition which will be sent to the appropriate parties. Hopefully we can make a difference and preserve the spirit of the open software movement in today's cut throat search engine market.
I personally think it is unlikely that M$ will ever dominate Google no matter how much money they throw at it for a number of reasons.
#1) Google has been branded into people's consciousness as THE way to search the net. While the landscape of search engines is littered with now fallen former champs ala altavista, Google has a ton of momentum behind it as a brand.
As long as they continue to innovate and return the most relevant results, it is very unlikely MSN search will achieve much penetration of this market. Why would people switch otherwise?
#2) M$ has rarely been an innovator in ANYTHING. In the world of search engines, being one step behind just isn't going to cut it. Google has consistently shown themselves to have a bold, creative overall vision. M$ has always lacked one and still does.
#3) Google is now flush with cash after a very successful IPO. Earnings are going gangbusters and look like they will do so for the forseeable future. They are going to be in a financial position to execute on their game plan. M$ may also have a cash hoarde, but Google's stock price and cash give them the tools necessary to challenge M$ on their own turf if so desired.
Momentum is a powerful force, look at Ebay's domination of the auction market. As long as Google continues to lead, and M$ flails along behind, Mr. Softee will remain flaccid in the search engine market.
The power and information google has and will continue to imporve [sic] upon is scary.
I hope you're being intentionally ironic here.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Seriously, why do you think it's worth it for Microsoft to bother getting into search? It's not because billg's interested in the technology, it's because they have millions of eyeballs anyway because MSN is set as the default homepage in millions of browsers.
They are using their own search with their own advertising system to monetize that advantage. They don't have to be better than Google for that to work, just not completely suck donkeys.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
agreed....microsofts seems to have the need to stick their nose into everything great. new technology comes out that a business is making alot of money on, and M$ instantly feels the need to go after them. i hope they lose a ton of money on this.
No.
Because Google is really, really good. Netscape lost because it sucked more than IE for a time. Google is better.
That said, I see this being used by people who's lives revolve around MSN instant messenger, to find flash games and ecards (which it will probably be good for). In other words, the people who use the old MSN search already.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I personnaly have found msn search to have a few more results which google couldnt find for some specific searches. So for that particular search, msn was better, as it found all the stuff google did and more. Those are the facts and can't be denied.
However, I have to say that google has a better URL to remember for people on a kiosk etc and need to just pull up a search engine.
Most people think of a web site as 'word' dot com. ie, to remmeber google all you need to remember is the word google.
But for msn search, you have two words, separated by dots, which could be in any order. In fact, the logical order of "msn" then "search" isn't correct. If I were search.com, Id put an entry for the msn sub domain and get some hits. Or sell it to Microsoft, cause most people are going to be typing 'msn.search.com' instead of search.msn.
That said, msnsearch.com does work, though searchmsn.com is registered by someone else.
I.O.U One Sig.
Google has to screw up pretty bad to get me to go try microsoft code. I really am trying to avoid that wherever possible, and I suspect most tech/geek types are doing the same.
The might win on inertia, but then Google's already in that mindspace for most people.
Microsoft should be more truthful about it in their commercials. The end should have the Microsoft logo with the caption: "Because you'll eventually be forced to use it"
Sure, hits are probably the most important aspect to a search engine; but, Microsoft just doesn't understand what makes Google what it is.
I use Google because it gives me accurate search results without all the added crap. I am emphatically uninterested in having an ad for the latest version of Office display when it's totally unrelated to my search material.
Unless Microsoft can think about something other than money for a change, it's not going to happen for them. You and I both know this will never happen.
My lame blog.
Supplanting Google isn't even hard, relatively speaking. Just be better - total cost of migrating from Google to another search engine approaches nill.
The question, of course, is can MS supplant Google? I doubt it. The reasons:
* Microsoft can't pull a MS Works or similar trick - namely they can't undersell on a poorer product until it hits market saturation
* They can't use proprietary API's or file formats for lock in
* They can't bundle it with their OS
* They can bundle it with their other web services, but when Google trashed Yahoo! many moons ago, it was made clear that superior search engine beats stack of web services.
* MS has no skill making a successful web service. Hotmail and MSNBC are strategic grabs of other services or content (anyone have a counterexample?).
* MS does not seem to have a corporate philosophy that would easily lend itself to Google type ads, which are the only search engine ads I have ever been lulled by. How will MS make a profit?
Of course one has to wonder why they entered the search engine market anyway. I suspect it is simply because it's cool, and much though you may loath them you've got to get MS that. They go where it's cool, even if it's not profitable all the time - they can afford it. Of course, once they are king of a market, they are ruthless about squeezing the rock for all it's water . . .
Of course. They'll just integrate an easey accessable interface to MSN search in Longhorn, and no one will bother to open up google any more...
I think Google's really hit the nail on the head here. Google works, it's gonna be tough for MS to overcome unless they just do it a lot better, and that's pretty doubtful. What they need to do is concerntrate their efforts on the next big thing, rather than trying to outdo Google at what it already does.
Google continues to run a service that is fast, reliable, and modern. They're aggressively broadening their service base, they've attained the pinnacle of name recognition, and they're not showing any signs of letting up.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it would be that Google is trying to do too much, too fast. What in the world does trying to be a domain registrar have to do with increasing their search capabilities? Plus, Google's research into search AI is not at the level of Microsoft's. (Never, ever underestimate the power of Microsoft Research.) There are some indications that Google may indeed "sit on their laurels" and let Microsoft pass them by.
You have to realize that Microsoft is a very big, very powerful company with an enormous R&D department and a gigantic marketing machine. Google has won both market share and mind share, but both can be taken. Microsoft is in a position to do it. One underestimates at one's own risk.
The coolest voice ever.
Let's take a look into the recent past:
How did MS's IE beat Netscape? By integrating IE it into Windows. Don't you think that the MS plans to make this search technology 'hard wired' into future (or even current) Windows releases to circumvent users's access or choice in using Google?
Netscape also had some serious quality control issues which was the final nail into its coffin. I suspect, however, that Google is in a much better position to compete than Netscape ever was. But, they're going to have a serious fight on their hands--it's not about quality, it's all about quantity to Microsoft. The more drones out there who start using MS's search engines because the next Windows iteration pushes Google aside will start to erode at Google's profitability and they will play a long hard war of attrition.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
But hell no, M$ has shown an amazing lack of understanding in the past 15 years in security, customer needs and wants.
The name Google means "easy and fast" or "accurate" The name Microsoft means "insecure" and "ineffective".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
TV ads
Google being purely a "being in written" doesn't have an identity (yet?) that "speaks" to TV and radio audiences. I for one couldn't imagine what kind of TV ad would Google set up...
I prefer to be believe that Microsoft will put a bunch of money at into it, then throw a fit and give up. Their following will never grow much beyond the MSN customers that don't know any better.
If people are now treating google as a verb, bringing us tantalizingly close to a content-addressable web, how can Microsoft possibly usurp that kind of common recognition? Microsoft is already a verb, too; to do something expensively wrong (perhaps not in as common use as googling).
If all this 'fan-fare' isn't just Microsoft's own manufactured hype, which I believe it is, this will have a polarizing effect on the search industry. Expect AOL and Yahoo to publicly bring in (or restore) one search technology or the other, leaving people like Inktomi in the cold.
Google has the market right now. They have the brains, the experience, the technology, and enough funding. They do not have a monopoly on Desktop Operating Systems. Google will lose this fight.
Someone will inevitably point out MS's failure to dominate with the X-box, or in some other venture. Let me make this clear. If the U.S. Justice system remains bought (as they are now) MS can crush anyone in any market dependent upon the desktop. In order to get to Google 90% of all people use Windows. MS can just build the search functionality into Windows and, so long as it works well enough for the average person, they will not bother to use a different search engine. It does not have to be as good as Google. It can have 10 times the ads. It can rank everything according to who pays the best. It can fail to work in anything but IE. It can shamelessly promote MS with marketing crap. It does not matter. So long as it is "good enough" to actually work for most people and it is built in, it will win.
MS sometimes takes years to get a product "good enough" but they have the time and the money, and most importantly, the monopoly.
WMP r00lz, AAC teh suck!
Yeah, right.
All they have to do is integrate the search into IE and they will control the market.
For example they could have a feature that displays the msn search results every time you search any search engine such as google (in a side iframe).
Alternative they could have common search results precached on the browser level so it appears faster.
Even better, Microsoft could use its clout with the media (NBC), Libraries (where Gates donated lots of PCs), and Encarta to integrate their content.
2) The domain problem. For those few who do not have a Google bookmark (or have a built-in window a la Safari and Firefox), they can likely type "google.com" into their browser faster than...(they're already typing in their query). "search.msn.com" is just, for lack of a better word, ugly.
Innovation: Microsoft should buy a simple domain as a home for their search. Which brings us to...
3) The branding problem. For a company has huge and rich as Microsoft, they are strangely conservative about protecting the amazingly well-entrenched brand "Windows" (whether that's a valid trademark is an other issue). It's almost as if Microsoft has given up on branding and just "wings it" (Windows Movie Maker? Windows Media 9?). Face it, just adding "Windows" or "Microsoft" or "msn" (ooh, that rolls of the tongue) breaks all the rules of branding. Google is a verb because it is fanciful.
This is a trick question, right?
HANDLE ResolveAddress(LPSTR lpstrAddress)
{
if( strcmp(lpstrAddress,"www.google.com") == 0)
{
strcpy(lpstrAddress,"www.msn.com");
}
return ResolveToIPAddress(lpstrAddress);
}
The problem is that MSN Search is a direct ripoff of Google. Look at this MSN search page compared to this Google search page. The Google UI is simpler and cleaner, and Google has services that MSN doesn't (at least yet).
MSN Search adds nothing that makes the searching experience better (personally I find MSN Search to be less accurate than Google), and it doesn't fundamentally improve on what Google's doing. It's following, not leading.
Google has become a household name and a generic verb. That means that Microsoft has to somehow convince people that MSN Search is better than Google - which is a tough sell. Even if they try to bundle it with Windows, this isn't like the browser wars. You don't have the seek out and install Google on your computer, you just type in the address or click on a bookmark. Hell, I'm guessing that a good fraction of computer users already have that Google bookmark and use that for most of their searching.
Google is an entrenched brand, and Microsoft has very little chance of dislodging it.
With all the hype surrounding the recent release of MSN Search, are the search engine wars heating up?
:-) So nothing I could call hype, just "regular news". I don't think MSN Search will change much at all in their current state. From my tests, their web/image search seem to suck more than Google's although some aspects are interesting and maybe more powerful. But since web search is basically what it's all about, well...
I've seen the usual blurbs in news when a new search engine from a large company is made but nothing exceptional. Not like Gmail-scale hype.
But yes, Microsoft can probably beet Google, but they need to come up with something better.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The internet did change some things, and one of them is that in a sense the net does not play by some traditional economic rules. We're not in a zero-sum game any longer. There's no reason why google and MSN search cannot both thrive, despite what the binary thinkers here feel. In a sense, there's no google vs. ms argument because users do not need to commit to one or another. I use both every day.
That's why it's not the same as the browser wars: people do not use two browsers simultaneously. But they can easily use two search engines in two different windows.
...somewhere in the back of my head there is a little voice that says "these people care that I get good search results above all else".
Microsoft just can't ever give people that feeling- It's against their nature.
A review of the new MSN Search by a USA Today columnist, points out some flaws. Notable among them being inability to give correct answer to one of their own sample questions. It also talks about disappointing performance of the "near me" feature in MSN Search vis-a-vis Google Local which is still in Beta stage
The main thing that will keep stopping me from using MSN search is the size of the page that the search box is hosted on.
I don't want to load a web portal or a news website, I just want a search box with a "go" button.
Microsoft needs to register www.microsearch.com or something and put a minimalist, google style interface up there.
Go to Google Suggest and type the words "msn search" in the search box and nothing more...
Take a look at the bottom suggestion....
I.O.U One Sig.
When will we see an IE7 with a "Search" button which uses MSN search by default with no alternatives or requires several obscure registry keys to be hacked to use an alternative search engine?
Nobody is going to beat Google at the search game unless they can significantly one-up them. Perhaps Microsoft can produce 0.6838% better search results if they really try but who cares? Google is here now and it works just fine. Something a "little better" won't make anyone jump ship. It will take a Altavista->Google size leap for anyone to take notice.
All MS can really do is force MSN as the IE default page and hope the non-technical users stick with it.
Imposter says MS can't beat Google (as he types at his Commodore 64, looks at his spiffy Edsel and drinks his Moxie). Imposter chimes, "Google has the headstart. No one can catch up."
This is why Google will release a firefox-based browser to take on IE. And given Google's current mindshare and resources they have a chance of actually killing the dominance of IE.
can the old supplant the new?
They can, but they won't. The difference between Microsoft and Google is the "Don't be evil" philosophy.
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe that Sergei and Larry are saints. I just think that they realize that their long-term benefit is directly related to how well they serve their customers, and the fact that they consider users of the search engine to be customers also, not just a commodity to be served up to their paying advertisers. I think "Don't be evil" is a subtle and subversive encapsulation of the idea that altruism is equal to pragmatism in the long run.
Microsoft isn't capable of this type of long-term thinking. Bill Gates makes money so fast that it's not worth his time to stop and pick up a $10,000 bill. With that kind of net worth, Gates could release powerful bug-free software at reasonable prices. He could be a genuine hero, and lauded as such, and still make immense amounts of money. The fact that he doesn't do this points to some kind of profound disconnection from reality, perhaps an emotional disturbance of some sort. That's why only 30 years after its founding, Microsoft is at the beginning of the end.
I'm sure Gates would love to topple Google, but not at the price of changing whatever twisted worldview leads him to throw away both riches and honor.
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
I think the battle will not be on the technology side, as most of the IT users are unaware of the strength of the technology they use on a daily basis.
I think that microsoft and google will fight on the marketing side, and also on the laws/pattents side. But i'm not sure google has MSs experience, when it comes to big lawyers battles. future will tell...
____
nico
Nico-Live
Microsoft had more people in R&D working on IE than Netscape had as a company.
Microsoft put the application on every operating system they shipped.
Microsoft told PC manufacturers that if they even talked to Netscape, they'd up their Windows licensing.
Microsoft 'encouraged' industry journalists and analysts to favor IE with sweet advertising deals and licenses.
Microsoft gave away their product.
Netscape didn't rest on its laurels, it just couldn't support development for a product with no revenue. Once M$ started giving away competing product, Netscape lost 70%+ of it's revenue stream because it couldn't charge for their browser.
They could use the same tactics they used so that IE beat Netscape. OK so they would lose a court case but they're prepared to pay a few bucks on the way to global domination.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
How about the consumer? With all these companies vying for our attention, there's bound to be a few really great innovations along the way.
The superior product will supplant the inferior one...oh, wait. The check cleared. MSN Search, baby!
GOOG is worth billions. On paper.
MSFT is worth billions. On paper. And in real hard assets (and not just code).
Google went from a gnat to a housefly, and now it's approaching horsefly status. MSFT is the cow, and the tail can swish unexpectedly at any time, leaving you dumbfounded in the manure.
Just add this to your httpd.conf to block Microsofts bot:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^msnbot.*
RewriteRule / [F,L]
No content, no success.
Having a superior product means nothing if you can't market it. For years, NetWare was superior to NT, but MS beat the crap out of Novell in the marketing game and hence, won the battle.
"With all the hype surrounding the recent release of MSN Search, are the search engine wars heating up? No, the "hype" wars are heating up, untill MSN Search can be trusted to return non slanted results (ie limited linux results) there is no search engine war.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Competition is always good for the user. There are not so many (relevant) spiders out there, and now that msnbot joined the small party, one can expect more results out of *metasearch* engines.
The real issue here is potential lockdown by Microsoft. They are in a position to do this, because they control the desktop of more than 90% of the population. Just like their .doc (and other) file formats, they may later modify the frontpage of search.msn.com in such a way, that it requires some proprietary MS-only application or library to get [quality] results. Like in: "Use *our* OS to search the web, or get lost, freak!"
Google wouldn't do this, because they don't control the desktop. They could theoretically too modify their front-end to force users to download some proprietary application to access their results; but it seems highly unlikely, regarding their past (and hopefully future) integrity. At least let's hope so.
Or am I just too paranoid w.r.t. Microsoft, and they are really trying genuinely to "play nice" this time?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Some reason why I believe Google is so successful is due to it's simplicity and lack of clutter. It looks aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. MSN's page looks like the home page for a lot of ISPs.. cluttered with ads, news, loads of navigational options, and the page takes a bit longer to appear. I don't see how Microsoft will get people to use a slower service that offers fewer results, and with less innovative tools.
It is possible to beat Microsoft.
A perfect example of this is Intuit. They've managed to keep Microsoft at bay despite fierce competition. Those flames were fanned when an acquisition of Intuit fell through therefore strengthening Microsoft's resolve.
Nevertheless Intuit is still with unlike lots of MS road kill that comes to mind.
This question to some degree seems pointless. It assumes that somehow Microsoft's desktop monopoly will mean that people will stop using a web application (search) with a brand that has become incredibly powerful.
This seems like a variation on all the claims that Apple was on its death bed eight years ago. In fact I remember seeing NBC News running a story that seemed to echo this industry consensus.
And despite Microsoft's desktop domination, it seems most Microsoft employees (much to the chagrin of MS management) are opting to patronize Apple with its latest creation, the iPod. The story in Wired was featured in Slashdot just recently.
Google is incredibly entrenched in people's minds. It has become a powerful brand. Evidence of this is the fact that people readily use its name as a verb.
Microsoft setting its search engine as the default for whatever future browser they release will *not* cause people to stop using Google.
-M
Actually, they can to a certain extent - at least, they can integrate MSN search into their desktop search tool, and all their apps. "It looks like you're searching for something. Would you like to use MSN to search the Internet?".
Also, I personally think that they don't really want to be in the search engine market - they just don't want to risk Google's brand becoming predominant over theirs...
* They can't bundle it with their OS
Are you challenging Microsoft on that one? Not a very wise move...
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
Looks like they are trying to do the same thing now. Let them blow all kinds of money on this. Better for us. I'll keep on using alta vista.
The thing that sets google apart is its "Did you mean...?" feature. MS Search is years behind. For example type in:
"f*ck m*cr*s*f"
Remember to insert your favorite vowels, but also leave of that 't'. Microsoft search gives no "Did you mean...?" Google however gives a correct spelling.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Googles success was and is based on having more relevant results for any given search query, via their PageRank technology, than its competitors. While PageRank has been found to have its flaws (SEO spammers, etc.) and is thus - for the moment - loosing its high signal to noise ratio, the only way MS will win is by doing two things.
1. Implementing their own PageRank-type algorithm
2. Beat the SEO spam
Marketting just won't cut it. It has to better and more relevant to win.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
I recently completed a VBA/MS Access project. Now Access is a cool program for people who can't code... but as a programmer more comfortable with C, perl and java it was like trying to practice olympic diving in a kiddie pool.
I was frustrated fumbling in gui land and decided to use the frustration as a test of the search engines since I wasn't find answers easily thru the Google .
I did my searches in the new MS search, Google and Yahoo and found that Yahoo's results were most relevant, followed by Google and then MS. Now if their search motor doesn't work for their own products, how do you think it's going to work for finding tidbits on more important things?
Yeah, right.
Google Search
(25 900 000 results)
versus
MSN Search
(18 300 000 results)
The winner is: google search
The best is still the winner...
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
First Guy: "Dood, what happened to your server?"
Second Guy: "Oh, that. It Microsofted last night."
First Guy: "Hey, I thought you said your files were secure!"
Second Guy: "Well, somebody Microsofted me over the internet."
First Guy: "You look awful! What the hell happened?"
Second Guy: "I was walking down this dark alley and a couple of punks Microsofted me."
step 1) ship a desktop version on every PC sold with their OS(s)
:-/
step 2) make it the DEFAULT for every Microsoft application pre-installed on Windows
step 3) make the desktop search fall back to Microsofts online search
step 4) create this system with a nice little flaw which captures all google searches and mistakenly does a Microsoft search
step 5) tell the DOJ that it was a coding error and that it will be fixed soon, reall soon now, it's almost done,.....
Otherwise, it's doubtful that they can actually compete with Google but they are great at preventing/blocking choice. Somehow, customers always seem to ask for this. Go figure.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
and I use it every day, it's not perfect.
If it put a small header at the top with things it thought were "catagories" as suggestions to refine your search, that wouldn't suck. (I'm aware of how easy that is to say, and how difficult it is to do quickly and well)
If they had a simple option to filter blog comments out for all the blog software, or better yet collect them, display them as an option like they suggest for misspellings...
On the other hand, if MSN starts to show a marked increase in the usefulness of their hits, adding handy features I can't guess at, or next gen technologies such as humming that tune, or sketching a picture, word of mouth will spread pretty quick, and google will take it on the chin. Big ifs, but in the realm of possible.
Despite the contemporary views of Slashdoters, I'm fairly certain Google has a healthy respect for Microsoft Research, as well as the giant's budget. With the well documented smoking corpses of former companies providing a compelling warning about the pitfalls of complacency.
Unfortunately the words "beg the question" when parsed seperately and then combined do yield a meaning very close to the one in common use, the one described as wrong. I'd rather see the term limited to the older sense, since it doesn't have any other phrase to describe it, but I can't reasonably claim that the newer use is wrong.
Why is anything anything?
Hello passengers- we've reached our cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. I am going to switch the seat belt sign off in a moment so feel free to stretch and move about the cabin. Those of you on the right can look out the windows and see the Grand Canyon, while those of you on the left can look up and see the OP's comments, passing harmlessly above the heads of the unsuspecting.
My website is hosted by apple (.mac), I have a google search button, and a blogger account.
That is like kryptonite to MSN search, I am not anywhere on their search engine.
Google automatically starts out ahead in the game: The percentage of people out there that have favorable thoughts associated with the name "Google" is higher (probably on the order of a few magnitude) than those who think positive thoughts of "Microsoft".
Simply because I strongly dislike Microsoft (and thus everything associated with them), I will continue to use Google.
Microsoft would have to seriously surpass Google in order for me to switch, and I suspect the same goes for many others.
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!
Regarding search quality, MSN bombing is already starting, without involving Google searches. If you search for 'merda' (italian word for feces, unpolite), the first result is a Vatican City congregation.
E.g., http://search.msn.it/results.aspx?q=merda.
Too many people are forgetting that although 99.99% of people on here are proper computer geeks, we make up about 0.001% of all the people that use computers and the internet.
The majority of computer users know of no reason why they should hate Microsoft, when you consider how many people still don't even know what spy/mal/parasiteware is, or the amount of people who don't know what a firewall is or have an up to date virus checker etc.
People are quite happy to use whatever tool is first there (why else would they download so many spyware toolbars?), many millions of people in this world have MSN as their homepage either because they don't know how to change it or they actually use the search functions on there.
Yes Google is very very well known, as is Microsoft and MSN. While the marketing ploy wont work with us geeks, I'll quite happily bet it'll affect large numbers of 'ordinary' computer users.
I love the slick, clean and crisp design of Google but it's amazing the amount of people who prefer a site such as MSN because it's got pretty flashing lights, lots of colour and all the rest of the shit on it.
Just because we're geeks doesn't mean that everyone else thinks like us.
And "I'm" has an apostrophe in it, goddamn it! But you don't get off either, you should have had a comma in your first sentence.
In order for Microsoft to use its monopoly leverage, they have to take the clean, uncluttered Google-ripoof search page, and make it the default home page in new versions of Internet Explorer.
They cannot and will not do this, because whatever profitability the MSN division may be eking out right now, is only because cluttered-with-ads.msn.com is the IE default.
It's really as simple as that.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I'm not trying to troll, or even make a politcal statement, but aren't some of these "wars" rather silly and/or contrived? First browser wars then search engine wars?
Browsers and search engines are important, but it seems like "wars" reserved for more significant issues....otherwise it seems like we're headed for "varchar vs. char" wars.
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
It's a simple case of economics really. New technology is embraced for one of two reasons.
1) It's better in some way (generally faster with computer equipment).
2) It's cheaper.
I don't see that MSN seach is any faster and they are both free so it's not cheaper. Of course this is a simplified case and in reality the two criteria play off against each other (a processor twice as fast as todays that costs ten years pay probably won't become popular even though it's "better") and it is probably fair to say that to supplant Google you are going to need to have a tick next to both the statements above.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
MSN has already created a bad image with me. I will never use or trust anything with the MSN name...ever again. Just like I'll never use AOL again, etc... MSN == Crap
"The power and information google has and will continue to imporve upon is scary." Here's a crazy idea: if you don't like Google's business practices, don't use it. I don't remember anyone holding a gun to my head if I wanted to use yahoo's search
The MSN "search engine" is not even a real search engine meaning that is lack some crucial features of a search engine such as indexing with advanced heuristics, significance assignment, etc. From my personal experience and comparing it to other engines like Google and Yahoo I have to say MSN search simply sucks. Big times.
But they can choke them within an inch of their life and then buy them out.
- Kevin
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
Microsoft's worst enemy is on-line applications. They really don't want to go that route, but are being forced into it. I wouldn't worry too much about google.
I run a small company that sells technology for parallel synthesis, an approach to doing early stage drug discovery research. When I search "parallel synthesis" on Google, my web site shows up on the gazillionth page. On MS search, it's on page 2. I gotta like that.
I think that Google is really in the position of power here, because they SPANKED Microsoft on their own turf. I am talking about the desktop search tool. Microsoft is now coming out with their own version - on the OS that THEY created which has built-in searching capabilities!!! I find this very telling about Microsoft's abilities to "innovate". Why didn't they ever improve the search capabilities built into the OS? And animated dogs, at least to me, don't count as innovation.
Google is floating like a butterfly (pun intended) and stinging like a bee, whereas Microsoft is trying to figure out a way to fix the fight.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"Which search engine would you like to use, the boring one, or the one that gives you the chance to win tons of free money!?"
Remember that? That was the ad campaign for iWon.com. Apparently people actually wanted good search results, not free money.
But anyway, Google needs to drop it's elitist attitude about advertising if they want to succeed.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Will it? I have no friggin' idea!
Let's face it, Microsoft really only makes money on Windows and Office. Nearly everything else loses money, e.g., Xbox, MSN, WebTV, etc. Or to put it another way, in reality Microsoft really fails quite often.
I personally think that Google will be around for a long time. But that's just mindless speculation combined with wishful thinking.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
What is the product? The music? Of course not. One argument is that the product is herself. Britney's body. Britney's voice. Britney's sugary production. Britney's image. It's a total package.
Then we have the "Britney as medium" argument that I quite like. Britney has become a medium for content delivery unto her own. She delivers a musical production. She delivers the lyrics of others. She is the box that the product comes in, the item inside the box and the marketing splash on the front of the box (Yes, I do enjoy talking about Britney's box, thanks for asking).
Then we get to Windows as portal. Let us assume that the non-intuitive nature of Windows is ingrained so much into us that it has become intuitive. It is transparent and no longer about using windows, it is about what it brings to us. Movies. Music. Word Processors. The Internet. Now MSN Search is a way to frame the Internet by Microsoft, which is quite ingenius. Google has already begun doing this, GMail, blogger, froogle, answers. The search page has become a way to deliver their product (Much like Windows delivers Microsoft product).
Did your head just explode? That was quite the rant, 8.2 belligerent points to essreenim.
lol what
Didn't Yahoo try to *make* themselves a verb before Google became dominant (in the Joe User department that is). Remember 'do you Yahoo?'. Of course those of us who were introduced to google many moons ago never looked back (although I do believe there are still some pretty good other search tools out there)
Original Mac vis IBM PC/XT/AT?
Was the original Mac better then the IBM PC at the time? A sealed, un-upgradeable box with no games, and a small monochrome screen? Puhleez.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
letting people run grep, sed, awk, etc on the entire text of the internet would be imposible due to time constraints, and not only that, it would return you a bunch of garbage
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
And just like Microsoft beat Sony in the game box market.
/has/ been running for 478 days...
And just like how IE beat Mozilla in the brower market. (I just fired up current IE for the first time in months to download some Office templates which refuse to play with Firefox. Guess what? IE hanged, crashed and burned on this clean XP Pro laptop on a microsoft page. Visited it again - crash. I've forgotten what it's like to have a browser crash with Firefox).
And just like how XP beats Linux in the uptime wars. Oh wait, I guess that Linux nameserver (Pax/GRSecurity config)
Actually, I mention the reliability things because MSN is already regarded as an unreliable site due to Microsoft's apparent lack of networking knowledge. Because MSN blocks various ICMP messages, it has a detrimental effect on path MTU. Subsequently, we have lots of customer calls from PPPoE, VPN and GRE tunnelled customers who can access google just fine but not msn.com. It usually takes a combination of a confused firewall, router or PC on their end combined with MSN's ICMP practices. But instead of going into how path MTU works, explaining ethernet frame sizes and negotiation of smaller frames for protocol overhead, we just ask them to try google.com or pretty much any other search site. Wala... it works. The customer leaves realizing once again that Microsoft is not reliable.
Way to go Microsoft networking boys... next time, please read the RFCs if you'd like to play with the rest of the Internet.
I live in France, and strangely search results start with links to pages in French.
Why would that be wrong? Because of the following:
- I did check that the language setting is to "Search pages written in any language".
- My search request didn't contain any French word.
- My OS is a completely U.S. system. (No French locale)
My conclusion: MSN Search is making too strong an assumption about the fact that I am located in France, but unfortunately I cannot change that.
Since English is the most wide-spread language on the Internet, I am concerned that the French links on top of the results page would not have the best relevance.
Note -- I tried to connect to search.msn.com, but it automatically goes to search.msn.fr. Anyhow, that shouldn't make any difference, as for Google.
..ever. Remember when you searched for "linux windows" and it only coughed up 16 sites, all of which were advocating switching FROM Linux TO Windows? I'll never use a search engine that censors it's results to the sole benefit of the company that owns it. Because then it's not a search engine, it's a propaganda tool.
Neither of the current search engines are really all that great. Its still extremely hard to find some things because nothing is catagorized or organized, its just the most popularly linked pages that contain the words searched for. Which for alot of things works well...but god forbid you search for anything that could potentially be sold...then your flooded with sales sites. Take for example if you wanted to find out if a 94 honda accord has cup holders...you really have to do some fancy searching to find this....search for 94 "honda accord" "cup holders" and you'll get sites selling cup holders, sites selling accords, that also contain nissans with cup holders etc. But if the data was some how organized via meta tags or whatever, i could at least narrow it down to non-classified sites, non-sales sites, and specificially technincal sites or whatever. Yahoo's old directory did this, I think we could find a way to do it with meta tags now.
More importantly, the meaning of "begs the question" as a logical fallacy *doesn't* make sense when you parse the words seperately and exists today mainly as a way for obnoxious people to tell other people how smart they are. It's like being pedantic about the word champagne in any context other than a conversation among wine experts. I've never heard any one of these angels of linguistic perfection use it in the "correct" context.
they upgrade their system and find its set to MSN search, we will be gladly resetting it back to Google for them.
;)
Last I checked, I don't hear my co-workers saying "search.msn.com".
Yeah! And "fallacy" has two "l"s, damn it.
I just dont think this is the place for internet search engine companys. It's extreamly easy to make a tiny 100k program that can search an NTFS drives MFT at a speed thats almost un noticable to any human and this is the method I use to search my system. Though this does not help people still using FAT or Linux and MAC formated drives :)
Other players would like to take some of this revenue. The inclusion of indexing of pages that don't buy ads is just the necessary come-on to entice viewers to use the search engine when doing product-oriented lookups.
If Microsoft can undermine Google and Yahoo in the ad word business it will cut off their "air supply" and they will no longer be able to afford to provide such extensive free indexing services.
I wonder how hard it would be to create a little applicaton which does a GET on all the paid ads in a search results page and causes the click-through payment model to fail?
The new ad blocking features in Firefox have already altered the interest in banner and popup ads.
-- Robert D Feinman Landscapes, Panoramas, Photoshop Tips and Musings on Society
People (A9.com, MSN search, etc) don't seem to understand that the reason why most people use Google is because of it's lightning-fast interface. It's simple... It's quick... The second I hit MSN's search page, i though, "Ugh... Look at all the CRAP that has to load every time I want to go here."
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
do a stock quote search for GOOG at search.msn.com
I have a plan. Using mainly spoons, we'll tunnel our way out of the city...
You know what would be hilarious? If Microsoft's search engine failed miserably and they sued Google for being a monopoly...
This is not my sandwich.
Microsoft never got any good marketshare with IE untill version 4, which supported frames. If netscape had a good product, they would have stayed on top. But they didn't. Netscape 4 was an unmitigated pile of crap. Hell, their buggy implementation of CSS held back web design for years.
If netscape had produced something like Firefox when IE four came out, things would be very diffrent.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I suspect the original poster was being sarcastic.
You must be an American.
I will never give up using google until they pry it from my cold dead hands, or I have to go to it's funeral. It's light on graphics, loads easy on dialup (what's that?) and doesn't point me to advertisers first. MSN has far too many graphics and problems with page loads for me to ever consider them.
No
M$ won a lot of battles like this one -- the spreadsheet war with Lotus -- the word process war with wordperfect and the likes -- the presentation war with corel and others -- the infamous broser war -- media player wars It (generaly) lost server wars, where the user os was not a leverage. the os leverage for seach engines is smaller vs desktop aplications, and hopefully the user base is less clueless by now. na google is no pussy cat.
At the time they launched DOS, there was no competitor for PC operating systems. Microsoft never do so well when entering an already established market. That's why they love being a monopoly.
im sure microsoft will try to peck away at google in the search engine market, then just end up trying to buy them.
Come on, we expect a better standard of writing on Slashdot.
I write .Net code for a living. Whenever I need to search MSDN, I generally try the built-in search on msdn.microsoft.com, fail to find what I'm looking for, switch to Google, and get page 1 links covering exactly what I need, often pointing right back to MSDN. If Microsoft can't effectively search their own site, then I'd say they're in way over their heads in competing with Google.
.... the only way microsoft could beat google would be if hey killed them so they would become them http://googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=googl e&q2=msn&B1=Make+a+fight!&compare=1&langue=us
there is proof that google will own msn search
i eat babies
WE ARE THE BORG. YOU WILL BE MICROSOFTED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.
lower case letters added for the sake of the lame-ness filter. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.
Wow, you're psychic. I suspect you're the most brilliant person in the world.
With a mind like that, why do you even bother posting on Slashdot, or are you slumming?
As for sarcasm, since I'm an American, it's naturally a sentiment that is altogether foreign to me.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
What does Microsoft have up their sleeve?
The execs would never sanction a project of this scope unless they had credible reason to believe they could compete with a company whose name is part of the vernacular.
I think Microsoft "gets" the larger potential of search -- given obscure information, produce the best answer, customized for the user using a massive database. You start to see the potential for this when you start to factor in what the "obscure" information is.
is put a search box on the taskbar. Wouldn't you be tempted to use it???
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Google has tons of problems right now - questions regarding capacity, its "supplemtnal index" aka sandbox, its inability to prevent 302 hijacking, its reliance on Adwords (that's where the money is) and its continued loss of focus away from search. This is about the best time for MSN and Yahoo to be coming out with Google alternatives. I know that there are more than enough pissed off webmasters who have just about had it with Google and that could be the tip of the iceberg for Google.
"Plus, Google's research into search AI is not at the level of Microsoft's. (Never, ever underestimate the power of Microsoft Research.)"
Of course Microsoft's AI research is superior, you wouldn't expect SKYNET to be invented at Google, do you?
Imagine it... booting up my Microsoft Windows PC, surfing in Internet Explorer, playing my music in Windows Media Player that I've downloaded from MSN Music, collecting my email in Hotmail and chatting to all my buddies in MSN Messenger. Then when I get bored I go fire up my X-Box...
Sorry, but it's simply unhealthy and dangerous being that dependent on one single corporation, especially one who's one and only aim is to rip as much money as they can out of me.
Actively looking for a little diversity in life may be harder & more difficult than just sitting there having things handed to me on a plate, but at least I can have the illusion of feeling like a free-willed human being.
I'm sticking with Google, end of story...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
whois records are already public information
All Microsoft has to do with MSN is the same that it did with IE - integrate the crap out of it with every Microsoft product, from Windows to Word to Money to Encarta. People didn't stop using Netscape because IE was the better browser - it was because their shiny new computers started coming with a big ol' IE icon smack-dab in the middle of the desktop. When MSN is the default (and probably only) built-in search for Longhorn/XP, Word, Outlook, etc., it won't matter whether MSN is the better search engine or not - people will use it because it's right there, and integrated with their existing Microsoft products; and Google will slowly loose traffic.
Yes, if we let them.
That was classic intercourse!
Yeah, that latest song when she kills herself, I can only hope that one day I'll be able to peel away the vast amount of layers of that masterpiece.
/.ers think about what they like and hate and how popular those things are, they might get an appreciation for this argument.
There's like two instruments in that whole song. Probably the worst song I've heard in my life. To be fair (and I hate saying this) Toxic was all right.
Back to the topic at hand, I agree that a quality product does not neccesarily mean better sales. Did anyone actually enjoy the game Enter the Matrix? I didn't, and it sold much more than non-marketed games like Katamari Damacy (and KD was a miracle, it sold much better than most people expected)
In fact, this is a good site to make that point. I think that if most
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Not offtopic at all.
An answer "begs the question" when it undermines the question's premise. To "beg the question" DOES NOT MEAN "to pose the question".
That was classic intercourse!
The funny thing is that I have found that Lotus Word Pro is easier to use and more logical than word even though I have not had any formal training on Lotus Word Pro except have it installed on my machine in case someone were to call in about it. (and they do)
While I have major formal training in Word and I still find the whole concept of Section Breaks, Table of Contents, and Headers quite buggy and akward to use even with Word 2003.
But as we all not WordPro did not win the Document wars... So I think we can infer that it wasn't ease of use that was that cause.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
They will change any new installs of IE, or upgrades for that matter, to point to the MSN Search page.
Instant exposure, people will be used to going there as a default, and never change due to complacency or ignorance.
I'm not sure they should, would, or could (okay, maybe should and could) but pushing an update to IE that simply sets your homepage for you to MSN search would be quite amusing as well. Heck, lock it out even so you can't change it!
It is in Microsoft's soul to do something only good enough to keep the salespeople from lying outright. Microsoft has never been transparent in its financial interests, so the objectivity of their search results would always be suspect. Microsoft's goal is domination, and propoganda is not an ethical problem for them.
I'd just like to say that this is, what, the 4th /. article mentioning the launch of this thing and I have yet to go look at it.
Should we expect to see these popping up until you have reached a set number of click-throughs?
You can't take the sky from me...
On my PowerBook G4, which I bought in May and hadn't been superseded until last week, it's in Macintosh HD: Applications (OS 9): Netscape Communicator.
I'd send you a screen shot, but I deleted all the OS 9 apps right after I got the machine.
For more information, click here.
Just last night, I saw a commercial for the new MSN Search. It has to be better than Google -- after all, I saw it on TV!
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
Google is a good search engine but they've been completely owned by 'optimizers' [I have a slightly less polite term for them] for years now. Google really needs to radically change Pagerank soon, the worse their results get the more vulnerable they are to a competitor with better technology. It happened to us when I worked at AltaVista, we tried adding a bunch of features instead of improving core search results and we got completely killed by Google which had almost no features, just better results.
From what I can tell both Google, and the new MSN search suffer from the same problem. Results-Noise. There are so many results to any search now that its next to impossible to find what you want. Where the market should focus on would be in the area of culling the result set to something more manageable. Do I need 30,000 results when I never look past the first page?
One thing I would LOVE to see would be to allow me to specify how close together the search terms have to be on the page. If the terms are close together, it is probably more relevant then if they're at opposite ends of the page.
Windows server: Sure, some folks buy it, but plenty don't. So far, Microsoft only has about one third of this space, and Linux is nipping at its heels. They knifed Windows for Itanium, to the disappointment of both Itanium users.
Server appications: IIS has lost market share to Apache in recent years, and Exchange isn't ubiquitous yet either. SQL server enjoys showing the web its limits.
Windows CE/Mobile/Tablet/whatever: Still no monopoly, and since sales of PDAs are shrinking and tablet PC's haven't really caught on, even if MS did take over this market...
Game Consoles: XBox did just have its first profitable quarter. Ever. But it doesn't seem to sell so well overseas, and Nintendo and Sony haven't been persuaded to go away yet.
Media: Media Center PC's aren't selling so well, and in a world with iTuneszilla stomping around, Windows Media suddenly seems less likely to rule the universe than it did a few years ago, even with "PlaysForSure."
Internet Services: Even with its added features, MSN Messenger doesn't seem to be destroying AIM or Yahoo Messenger. MSN doesn't seem to be destroying anybody in general, even if Verizon throws it in free with DSL, and even if MSN is the homepage for Internet Explorer. Now Microsoft wants to go after Google, too.
It's pretty interesting to consider that Windows Client and Office are so frickin' profitable that Microsoft can afford to throw gobs of money at their unprofitable products and divisions (which are pretty much everything but Windows Client and Office) and still have huge heaps of cash left over.
(Oh, and I left off Apple, because if 95% of the world abruptly switched to Apple, Microsoft is second only to Apple itself in Mac software development, and would still be one of the most profitable companies out there, on sales of Office for Mac, VirtualPC, etc. Also, because as long as Apple is out there, and isn't owned by Microsoft, Microsoft can point at it and say "look, there are other choices, we're not that much of a monopoly!" :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
"Google is floating like a butterfly (pun intended) and stinging like a bee" Hope not - butterflies are slow + fragile and bees die right after stinging.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
I would say apple has already defeated ms and google
with their hot spotlight technology...
that is in integrating it into an os and apps.
I can't wait to sign up for Microsoft Desktop Search.
Personally i will always go to the site that has the LEAST ADVERTISEMENTS, I don't care whether its google, or msnsearch, or whatever else comes along. if msnsearch gives less advertisements then google (which they they do right now) then i will stick with msnsearch. and while i'm at it, since we're an MS house anyway, i might as well make the homepage msnsearch instead of google. loyalty? my a*s, its about clean functionality.
sigs suck
Get a grip you loser!
Don't judge people by the software they use!
I don't see how an email system without folders is ready.
OK, OK, so it doesn't beg the question... but it has a steep learning curve that's a real showstopper. ;-)
Face it--language changes. All the good phrases are getting taken over and misused, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"The Bible must be true, because God wouldn't lie to us; we know God is trustworthy, because it says so in the Bible" - Mark Israel
That statement begs the question. I just looked it up. Begging the question is when you base your argument on another statement that is just as uncertain as what you're trying to prove. Sometimes this ends in a circular argument, like the one above. Another example would be:
We know there's an afterlife, because without an afterlife, how do you explain ghosts?
This example is consistent with both the correct meaning, and in the one currently in use today. After all, this seems to beg the question "can you prove that ghosts really exist?"
If you search for "linux" on MSN, you get at the top a "sponsored link" which invites you to compare Windows and Linux servers through the "Get the facts" page.
Biased? I think not.
Well, maybe you moved to Firefox simply because it was better, but I can point to a bunch of people for whom I've set up Firefox, shown it to them, had them say thay liked it, and still see them using IE.
Why? Well, when I ask them, they give all kinds of ridiculous explanations that boil down to "The Internet icon brings up IE". They're simply not comfortable with change.
Occasionally one of them will point out that some web sites don't work under Firefox, but those are the sophisticates in the group - and they at least prefer Firefox when it works for them.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
If Microsoft can't beat em, they'll buy em. Or at least, they'll try. That's been their MO for years now.
I would question the question.
With all *what* hype? Given that Microsoft is one of the biggest, richest companies in the world, I'd have to say the launch of Microsoft Search was sort of pathetic.
Ask Excite, or Lycos for that matter -- if you want to make a splash in a tightly consolidated industry like Search, you're going to need to spend serious cash. In my opinion Microsoft underestimated. I'll put money on the fact that Microsoft Search wins over a pathetically small number of users.
I'd also put money on the fact that it won't ultimately matter, because Microsoft will win (like it always does) through bundling and leveraging their monopoly.
But as far as "Hype" surrounding the launch, I'd say it went off with a sputter.
My two cents.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The Hubble telescope cost billions of dollars to build and maintain. It has given us back a big fat zero dollars in return. So is it a failure? Financially, yes, you could say it's a failure. However, you cannot put a figure on the data the Hubble has sent back to scientists. The knowledge gained is incalculable, and to many it's worth every penny and more, it has been the greatest success in the history of NASA. To those who just look at numbers, it's a flying heap of scrap and and a financial black hole.
I would argue even knowledge has a price. And overpaying for knowledge is bad investment as well. Spending billions of dollars to send a camera to Titan for a couple of pictures is hardly good investment. How can those pictures help us now? When people can travel to Titan regularly, the pictures taken then will be much more valuable and useful. Since that won't happen until many years later, billions of dollars today is a bad investment compared to spending the same money on low cost space vehicle development or robot development. Of course that's just my personal opinion and I have no control over how EU waste their money. At least the investment provided entertainment value for nerds and geeks. But the knowledge gained through this entire endeavor is finite, and its impact on human race is calculable. The maximum value would be the total value generated by all those geeks and nerds inspired by this particular mission.
http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/demiliani/archive/ 2004/03/04/8450.aspx
A little curiosity... if you go to http://search.msn.com/ and search for 'XFree86', it tells you that you've 'entered a search term that is likely to return adult content, and directs you to the porn search engine NightSurf.com, which lists some porn sites that ostensibly match the term 'XFree86'. If you search for 'XFree86' on Google, however, the top matching terms returned by a normal search, are XFree86 sites, and not porn sites. The other curiosity is that if you search something like 'XFree87', the research reports correct results. Why this?
No.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Word is pretty shitty, but PPT is way worse. Fear the bloat! Heh. It's not even WYSIWIG--which can really suck if you don't give your presentations dry runs.
Excel actually IS a decent program, but development ended in 1997 and they've spent the last six years adding unnecessary "features" to make it act annoying when you're trying to get work done (Clippy, launching Help without warning, checking formulae for inconsistencies, auto-creating http links that launch iExplode.exe).
Google is a nice, small, honest and close-to-non-profit (Yeah, i know, they're not non-profit, but they do give out a free service to millions of people. Close enough) advertising company. I would trust them with my life. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a huge monopoly that does not give two shits about what they do to other companies, as long as they still rake in money (example: trying to wipe out every company that has emplaced any sort of competition against microsoft). Microsoft would compete with babies-r-us if they had the chance.
Or to put it another way, in reality Microsoft really fails quite often
/. believes in so desperately don't guarentee it sucess.
So, Microsoft is working in a comeptative environment where it's size, money and the "tactics" that
So it competes, winning some, losing some... in exactly the way many here claim it doesn't have to.
--> Fight tyranny and repression.... read
microsoft will do the same thing it did to netscape. and george w will just sit back and count his microsoft stocks go up. they will embrace extend and lockin people to their crap - doesn't matter if it is better - probably won't be - I hope they fall on their face with longhorn - I know I will never use any of their products again.
Could you post your script? Were you using Apache Mod_Rewrite?
Every new installation of Windows has IE as defualt browser and msn.com as the default home page, WITH a search bar.
And Google still keeps the market share. Even with a new toy, I believe they will stay on top.
You also might want to look into the Crawl-delay: tag for robots.txt. I decided to let MSN spider just my front page (no sub domains or picture galleries), but I put 'Crawl-delay: 120' in my robots.txt under msnbot to prevent them from coming to often. You might want to try that as well.
Nope.
If Kerry was the answer, it must have been a stupid question.
The UN - The largest "political" cause of death.
Google has MSN beat hands down when it comes to advertisers. Google just released the Adwords API. Appearently MSN requires a $70,000 minimum commitment and will only allow advertisers to adjust their listings once every 90 days.
I am a student in programming and I learned some web based programmation. I was wondering in what language that M$ made msn search and it turns out to be in asp.net witch I know how it works and I can tell you that it is a horror to program with Visual Studio .NET. It is also very heavy to run. On the other hand, google seems to be in php or some other language witch i didn't work with but according to what I have heard, php is much better and faster than asp.net. Also, MSN search doesn't have that "I'm feeling lucky" button that is very useful sometimes.
They can, if they have their own OS.. I claim trademark on that name, tho.. :-)
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
It is not a question of IF Microsoft will beat/kill/maim Google, but specifically "how".
They never "beat" etscape, but they managed to kill them off by using various tactics associated with bundling free competition with the OS, using strongarm tactics to make other vendors and ISPs adopt their tech, and most importantly by making IE non standards compliant, so that when peoplr developed for use with IE it produced pages that were incompatible with Netscape.
The only thing interestingnow is which of the previous tactics will be used, and what new ones may arise.
Things like Sony versus XBox are all drivel.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
1) Offer cheaper ads. Tout automatic million eyeballs. 2) Steal all google customers 3) Google misses earnings 4) Loss of revenue damps expansion 5) goto 3 There are multiple ways to skin the cat, I'm sure a determined Microsoft will come up with something.
I totally agree. Most people consider Microsoft an unstoppable force in the computer industry. But I see it as a fairly weak company if you look at the larger picture. Microsoft wins big in some areas but it mostly loses in everything else.
I think that's why those at Microsoft are so paranoid about competition. They know that Microsoft is built on a house of cards and the whole thing could fall at any time.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
MSNBC is homegrown as well as Slate and office.microsoft.com.
All three of these are high traffic successful homegrown web services, as is the clip art site, and heck even xbox live.
Windows update is quite a site... I think actually they may have *some* skillz.
But the real reason for the search is they do have their own world that needs it, MSN, just as AOL and Yahoo have their own little worlds.
"IE didn't win the browser war as much as Netscape lost the browser war."
You forget Window 95 second edition had Internet Explorer 3 bundled in with it (in addition to being bundled with Office etc.).
So there was no purpose in Netscape throwing money against the browser development because everyone would already get IE.
So Netscape concentrated on their server suite. Then MS bundled a webserver with Windows Server Processional and crippled the socket library on the normal version to stop it being used as a platform for Netscape's server.
Netscape didn't make a mistake, Microsoft broke anti-trust bundling laws.
I can't help but wonder why Microsoft would want to beat Google. I mean yeah, sure, it's pretty obvious that Microsoft can't stand to see any other technology company gain a dominant position. But aside from corporate ego and obstinance, what's really in it for Microsoft?
Money? I'm sure there's plenty of money to be made in the Internet search field. But Microsoft is already making money faster than it can count it. Microsoft hardly needs to add another profit center to its portfolio.
Control? I'm sure this is part of it. Microsoft can push around almost any tech company it wants to, either because it controls the platform that all those companies rely on, or because it can threaten to move into their markets. Not so with Google, which doesn't depend directly on Windows, and is established more than enough that Microsoft isn't going to knock them off any time soon. Google is a big, powerful company over which Microsoft has little leverage. That's a fairly new position for Microsoft.
But really, it's not like the Google search engine constitutes an OS-like platform that threatens Microsoft's bread and butter. Sure, maybe people will use some Google-based service to do distributed computing or something. But nobody's going to stop buying Windows and Office because they like using Google. Apple and Linux seem like much more significant threats to Microsoft's well being than Google.
For that matter, Microsoft seems like a much more significant threat to Microsoft's well being than Google. Microsoft's products are, frankly, pretty crappy, and people aren't going to put up with that forever. It seems to me that Microsoft would be much, much better off devoting the time and energy it spends on Internet searching to rethinking its existing products. Maybe break Word up into two or three products which are each a lot easier to use and which play well together. As it is, Word just gets in its own way when I try to use it. More importantly, it gets in _my_ way. And how about letting me choose between performance and eye candy in Windows XP, so that I don't have to buy a newer, faster PC every ten months?
So what is it that I'm missing? Why does Microsoft feel compelled to play king-of-the-mountain in every single tech market instead of shoring up its own existing businesses? Again, what's in it for Microsoft?
Can a horde of monkeys with typewriters write Shakespeare?
Convenient - adj.
MSN search will be intergrated into everything MS touches, and most users probably won't even realize it. It'll just be "search", "web search", "search the web," type your term in and go - from IE, from the file manager, from the start menu, on a desktop shortcut, from word - everywhere. For a while some will go out of their way to type www.google.com into their browser bar, but eventually, msn search will be good enough not to bother with the extra step or two. At that point, party over for Google search. Why do you think they're getting their fingers into so many other pies right now? They know it's comming - just a matter of when, not if.
Put it this way - if you wanted a cookie, you had the choice of walking three blocks to the store to get one, or just taking the one that's being delivered right to your door, and the cookies were roughly equivalent in pure cookie goodness - which one are you more likely to choose?
Yep, eveyone knows Bill Gates is a stupid JERK!
The only way Microsoft will beat Google is if the press keeps handing the microphone to them. Why does Slashdot post these stupid questions?
>Google is the next Alta Vista.
Um.No.
This is no way Google will become the next Alta Vista. Alta Vista never had the market share or brand recognition that Google does. Sure AV was big in it's day but that was when Yahoo and Overture and AV all had a simliar market share and users would regularly check out other SE's to find results. That just doesn't happen anymore. People just use Google.
Can someone explain this to me? (Someone with more geek knowledge than myself:) ) Surely the only way to beat Google is to develop a program that caches pages at a faster rate than the Google bots? I know Google have a great headstart with 8 Billion+ pages indexed but if someone could develop a way to index pages at a faster rate then wouldn't that do it? It's just my theory and I'm waiting for it to get blown out if the water so please..I'm all ears...
On the topic of words: Not that anyone cares, but to "beg the question" means to "take for granted or assume the truth of the very thing being questioned" (American Heritage Dictionary).
In this article the expression is used incorrectly to mean something along the lines of "which leads us to ask..."
Microsoft Research not only has at least one Field's medalist (Michael Freedman) but they've hired away whole groups from IBM's famous Thomas J. Watson research center.
Google has some excellent people (like Rob Pike) but if Microsoft wants to (only problem here is that the company looks down on the research division as non-productive in that they don't ship product) they could seriously tap into their research division.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
It's interesting to compare Google's mission statement to Microsoft's.
The goal of "organizing the world's information and making it easily accessible and useful" is extraordinarily broad. One sentence, simple, clear, easy to understand. Their behavior has thus far been consistent with this goal. If they keep doing this extremely well, don't become evil, and don't get killed by microsoft, they have a lot more going for them. Way more than Netscape ever had.
Contrast this with Microsoft: like practically everything else they do, Microsoft's mission statement is cluttered and noisy, a bunch of bulleted paragraps with headers and subheaders and lists on a huge page with annoying graphics. Not even worth reading.
I have not read the article.
The reason MS can't beat Google in searching is simple: Microsoft is a third-rate technology company. They can do generic software opretty well, but anything truly complex like search is beyond them..
Anecdotal evidence: Since MSN search launched and has a Near Me button, Google moved Location search to the front page. Being a fair-minded kind of guy, I decided to compare them. I went to each, filled in my location, and did the quintessential local search: pizza. The results:
On Google the first four were real Pizza places near me. Two I use frequently, one I didn't even know existed. After that were more Pizza places near me as the crow flies, but very far by road (and bridge). A map was provided, centered on my location, depicting each of the locations. The address of each shop was included in the results.
On MSN, the titles of the first four hits were (in order!) as follows:
A local church directory listing a weekly activity which included free pizza.
A link to "Pizz Today" boards, and to a forum having to do with cheese prices.
The Nerhood amily web log. Appearantly someone in that family recently had pizza!
The page in my county's Tourism web site listing things to do here, which happens to includes going to a name local pizza place.
If I am anyone, I already know of and probably use Google search. They have the mindshare already. If I try MSN search and get results of this... quality, then I will immediately laugh and go back to Google. MSN... well, it's a nice search engine for 1998.
I'm still laughing.
I want my Cowboyneal
Who modded this?
... fuck me gently with a chainsaw!
Plus, Google's research into search AI is not at the level of Microsoft's
Completely unsubstantiated tripe.
There are some indications that Google may indeed "sit on their laurels" and let Microsoft pass them by.
"Some indications"
There are "some indications" that the world will end in 5 minutes. There are "some indications" that aliens rule the earth. There are even "some indications" that 1+1=3.
Often it is impossible for a distributed crawler to make use of the not modified response because what can happen is you have two crawlers from different data centres crawling the same site at the same time. The checking is then done some time later...
When IE 4 first came out in 1997, it was a huge mess. I saw it render other browsers unusable when it was installed on 95 or NT. Double-clicking Netscape would no longer function. And for those who uninstalled IE, all programs no longer functioned. Nothing short of a reformat could fix it. For this very reason, I avoided IE like a plague ever since and never looked back. Some thought I was just paranoid for refusing to eve install IE, but to them, I get the last laugh now.
Apple overcame Compaq/HP/IBM (for a while) and was at the 50% of all computers sold for a certain period of time and far greater % in education.
At 18:43, I sold a PC that I assmebled from parts to a friend. It had a sticker FooBar.
I just achieved superior sales performance that neither Apple nor Compar, HP nor IBM can beat. At some point in time, I sold at a rate of 1 PC per picosecond. During that time, FooBar was the most successful PC selling brand in the world!
MSN's new search system already beats Google. Heck it's spidering my site on a regular basis, where I've had to ask Google to list it several times and it's only visited once or twice.
Seems Google is more interested in ad revenue and link placement, where Microsoft is only interested in spidering the web, like any good search engine should.
I'm surprised to be supporting Microsoft but they've got a winner this time... let hope they don't sell it out once they crush Gooooog.
Oh, and if you don't think Google can fall, remember Yahoo ? Heck, remember Webcrawler ? The nature of the net allows a better search to take off easily by word-of-mouth. If it works better, people will switch.
Regards, Lex
IMHO many of the posters here miss the point:
Google's money comes from advertising. Selling adwords. Not only on google.com but on a bunch of other sites too. Google could possibly live on without a single search.
I'm sure, that Microsoft can grab 30-40% of the search engine market by integrating their MSN search into their browser, into their desktop applications, into hotmail, into whatever. But that's not the death of google.
For example I am quite sure, that gmail can easily grab 20-30 percent of the webmail market (and hurt Hotmail). Even gmail in beta is far beyond anything I've seen in this area. So in a few years Hotmail will still have 200 million users, but Google will have the users that really use webmail (gmail is the first webmail service that is usable for more than 2 mails per day). And then Google will have a lot more ad space to sell (and make money from).
And Google won't stop here. Never ever forget that Google has a scalable, worldwide cluster which gives them unlimited disk space and unlimited CPU power. They won't stop when done with searching and mail. They will do a lot more.
5 years ago Netscape wanted to make a browser, that superseded the desktop. All apps should run in the browser. Netscape never figured out how to do it (as someone else pointed out, that Netscape was the main reason why Netscape failed, not Microsoft). But I'm sure, Google will figure out how to do this. There are a lot of people now with fast internet access, client PCs are fast enough, Google's servers are fast enough. Now the world is ready for "your browser is your desktop".
bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel