Slashdot Mirror
MSN Search Engine Favors IIS
Scud writes "It appears that if you want to rise up in the rankings over at the MSN search engine you would do well to host your page on IIS. Ivor Hewitt has done a study and it appears that by using IIS, you are likely to increase your odds of a higher listing by several percent."
...you gotta do something to pump up your buggy, non-mainstream, insecure webserver.
Yeah, right.
Mirror of Ivor Hewitt's site
To be conclusive, it needs to be a controlled experiment with the same text and same outgoing/incoming links.
Just the webserver alone changing. This can happen by taking a popular site and then changing what it reports to the MSN search robots.
But until such an experiment is done, the data is open to too many interpretations.
MS software installs MSN as the default search engine in many places, and there are an awful lot of users who don't bother to change anything, so when they hit 'Search', it's going to be MSN.
Unlikely.
Either MS has the world's best pattern recognition software by far (facial recognition software requires a lot of cpu work and under ideal circumstances, only accurate slightly more than 50% of the time) or they'd have to have someone sit and go through every picture ever indexed, then press a "Put this site to #1" button.
With Google indexing 8 billion pages, even spending 1/100 of a second per page would make indexing a multiple-year task and pattern rec. should take longer than that. Things like "is_site_running_IIS()" can be done far, far, far faster.
Maybe I've been trolled. Oh well. Hope someone learned something.
Eh, sorry to burst your bubble there, buddy, but MacOS X isn't a webserver.
Apache is a webserver. Zeus is a webserver. IIS is a webserver. thttpd is a webserver. MacOS is an OS.
So, you just lost any credibility with that mindless-drone-MacOS-X-troll. Compare apples to apples, please.
Besides, MacOS X is really not the best platform to run webservers off of -- the hardware is expensive, the OS is expensive. Try again. (hint: FreeBSD, which is really the heart of MacOS X, and runs on dirt-cheap x86{,-64} hardware)
One of our clients has a web app hosted on an IIS box and their main website hosted on apache. The web app ranks higher than the main website when doing a search for them.
(You do mean this link(San Andreas Radio), right?)
MSN - 3rd
Google - 3rd
With quotes around it:
MSN - 2nd
Google - 1rst
With a + (plus sign):
MSN - 2nd
Google - 1rst
I'm not sure where #7 came from (unless others have done repeated searches on this too). Do we know what Rock Star Games is using for their web server then to know if the IIS preference comes into play in this case?
- Google 7873
- Yahoo 3163
- MSN 199
- AOL 65
- Dogpile 44
- Unknown 41
- Earth Link 28
- AltaVista 16
- Excite 14
- A9.com 9
- Others 77
...which comes out to about 2% MSN.
Tha article actually links to an older smaller version of the analysis. There's a more comprehensive wordlist at: http://www.ivor.it/goog
God why the hell does everyone cry troll the minute someone makes an obvious joke
/. who have Aspergers) mean that what's an 'obvious' joke to you is a troll to someone else.
Because jokes are never obvious to everyone. Different senses of humour, cultural differences and the fact that some people think in different ways from other people (like people with Aspergers - and there are probably one or two people who read
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
"msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
Google is a company which publicy trade only a small tiny part of their shares. Most of them still belongs to founders, as they don't seem to even try to sell them.
So... No. It is not that way you state it.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
You can have a "conspiracy of one" if that person acts in multiple roles.
As an example, let's say that one person is a company's bookkeeper and CFO. (This isn't uncommon in small companies.)
As a bookkeeper she cooks the books to cover her embezzlement.
As CFO she prepares false financial documents for her company and its investors.
One person, criminal acts in two roles, so in many states she can be charged with conspiracy in addition to embezzlement.
BTW, this isn't a "conspiracy" in the legal sense since it's not a crime to give preferential service on the basis of web server. It's sleazy unless it's fully disclosed, but it's not a crime unless they actually sell the search engine as an unbiased tool.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I don't know what your point is, but yes, it is like I said.
Google is a company, in which shares of the company are traded publicly, a 'publicly traded company' --> public company. You are trying to split hairs over what portion founders/insiders own, but this is mearly called retaining 'creative control'.
As of Jan 2005 53% of the stock is owned by insiders, and I would not call 47% a 'small tiny part of their shares'.
Believe it...
First off, I looked at the difference in means for Apache rankings in MSN and Google. 61.5% (MSN) vs. 64.3% (Google) for 970 observations Right there, you ought to be able to eyeball it and see significance. But, to make sure, here are the results of a t-test which checks the likelihood that two matched sets have different means (forgive the crappy formatting):
M G
Mean 0.615061856 0.642948454
Variance 0.01100624 0.008740111
Observations 970 970
Hypothesized Mean Difference 0
df 969
t Stat -10.51551356
P(one-tail) 7.26569E-25
t Critical one-tail 1.646427658
P(two-tail) 1.45314E-24
t Critical two-tail 1.962415113
As you can see, the P is 1.45 x 10^-24, which at least makes us think the results are not pure coincidence. I don't intend on speculating on the causality, though...
configure his web server to report itself as IIS in the headers it returns. That's the only real way to know what a web server is running, unless you want to parse server-created error messages, or exploit vulnerabilities in the server itself.
This isn't true. IIS and Internet Explorer don't work according to spec. when closing down TCP connections in order to speed up subsequent connections between the two pieces of software. This can be used to differentiate between IIS and other servers.
RTFA! Google and MSNS aren't the only search engines he tested - they are just the only ones worth talking about. So you would have to conclude that /everybody/ is discriminating against IIS.
Add something like this pseudocode to your server:
if $Browser = "MSNSearchBot" then $Server = "Microsoft-IIS/6.0"
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Slow down a second.
First, anytime you see P 10^-24 for a sample of only 1000 and means differing by 3% you should be suspicious immediately.
And 969 degrees of freedom?!
Buddy, your stats are waaaaay off. There is just 1 DF in this data.
My guess is that you tried to feed categorical data to a t-test thing and it barfed (as it should), so you fiddled with it until it claimed to produce a successful result (by somehow misinterpreting each of the 970 observations as a degree of freedom) and now you've got P 10^24, which is lunacy.
thumbs down on your methodology.
> Maybe it is Google discriminating *against* IIS, not Microsoft for.
v ey.html) very closely.
He said that the distibution of servers from Google's results matched those published by Netcraft (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_sur
Try typing "online music".
On Google the top two references are iTunes and iTMS. On MSN you'll have to go through a few pages before you'll see anything about iTunes.
Yeah, I trust Microsoft to provide unbiased search results. Sure I do.
m.m.
Yeah the trouble is that the person who submitted the story linked to the old "original" result set i.e. the "/orig/" in the url rather than the more complete more recent results at: http://www.ivor.it/goog
I guess the "MSN against Google" report is more attention grabbing.
You are wrong, but not for the reason you think.
/" you are sending a HTTP 0.9 request. That was the first version of the protocol and is all but extinct. That version of the protocol had no such thing as headers, so if the server follows the HTTP 0.9 spec, you will never get any headers. Apparently IIS does not speak HTTP 0.9 very well.
When you telnet to port 80 and type "GET
However, if you use a valid HTTP 1.0 or 1.1 request: "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: example.com\r\n\r\n" you will get all the headers.
So, I'm sorry, but your point is completely wrong. Apache sends just as many headers as IIS, as the other poster points out. You should really stop using telnet and start using curl or wget. If you do use telnet, please get a clue about how HTTP works.