Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

MSN Search Engine Favors IIS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the kinda-surprising-i-guess dept.

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."

5 of 565 comments (clear)

  1. Not a controlled experiment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Would it even be worth it? by sh00z · · Score: 5, Informative
    Hre's the stats for my site, accumulated since April 1 (average 3000 unique visitors per day):
    - 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.

  3. Re:Do we see a significant effect? Is it just chan by Swanktastic · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

  4. Sweets for the sweet, lies for the liars by AndroidCat · · Score: 4, Informative
    MSN Search should be banned for being dishonest.

    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.
  5. iTunes? Never heard of it. by meatball_mulligan · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.