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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?""
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.
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).
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 . . .
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.
Who says that users must type search.msn.com in their URL text entry field? Microsoft could modify the apps so that everything that doesn't look like a URL will be automatically redirected towards search.msn.com. It would be actually even easier for users to search stuff: just type in what you need and voila, MSN search spits out a page of results.
That's the "beauty" of desktop dominance.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
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).