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."

Comments

FTFA

[Reignking]

So what's going on? I have no idea, I doubt it's all a big conspiracy... but some possible explanations spring to mind: Perhaps the MSN search has simply been coded by developers used to talking to IIS machines and so it just does that job better? Perhaps the MSN spider is taking advantage of some specific IIS features to provide enhanced indexing?

In other words, there are some explanations out there other than "MS is biased and there's a conspiracy and they are trying to take over the world"...

Re:FTFA

[coolGuyZak]

"ya know, I think we ought to favor IIS because IIS (insert some lame justification here)."
Maybe... "ya know, I think we ought to favor IIS because IIS is our product"?

Re:FTFA

[WoodstockJeff]

Is there a conspiracy? Why not?

No, there is no conspiracy. There may be a company policy , but conspiracies require more than one party. MSN is part of Microsoft, so this isn't the case.

Now, if Yahoo or Google were doing it, too, that could be a conspiracy.

Re:FTFA

[Otter]

The different results for "Linux" were noted here the day the new MSN beta launched and explained a minute or two later -- the MSN ranking algorithm weights the domain name much more heavily than Google does, which is why MSN favors Linux.com and Google goes for Red Hat.

My guess is that the server differences are somehow correlated with something weighted differently in their rankings. As someone else noted, the real test would be switching the server on which a site is hosted and seeing if its rank changes.

Or if that's too much work, one could also argue that Google ranks IIS down!

Re:FTFA

[coolGuyZak]

It makes the hit counts on their servers go up, which is something they can use to fuel the argument that IIS is better than Apache/thttpd/etc.

Also, if you are a "decision maker" who uses MSN Search, you'll see IIS everywhere. It will influence your opinion: you'll think it is more ubiquitous than it is.

Re:FTFA

[.com b4 .storm]

Or if that's too much work, one could also argue that Google ranks IIS down!

The problem with that is that Google (for now?) has zip, zilch, nada, and nil to gain directly by ranking any given server up or down. Google does not distribute or sell web servers, nor have any direct stock in any particular server and its success or failure. Microsoft, on the other hand, makes a web server - and if their search engine adjusts ranking in any way based on the presence or absence of that web server, that is rather fishy.

One could argue, of course, that Google has a stake in certain web servers (i.e. ones not controlled by companies like Microsoft) by virtue of them keeping the WWW open, and thus providing a viable arena for Google's search technology and money-making adverts. That's a bit different, though, and I'm not aware of any indication that Google favors open source web servers (or whatever) in their results.

it's foolish...

[hruske]

... to think ms wouldn't use all it has. Obviously it hasn't yet learned from google, that being evil is bad. And bad guys get punished.

Re:it's foolish...

[MoonFog]

In what world? Seing how MS has been allowed to do basically whatever they want in the US .. why would they suddenly change their ways? The bad guys clearly do not get punished.

I laugh at Microsoft.

[the_mutha]

... and they still think they can beat Google to the game. When are they going to realize that what made Google so successfull was the fact that is has been so unbiased in all ways imaginable, including not accepting payments to get higher rankings.

Google makes money by prioritising quality. Microsoft makes money by prioritising money.

Go figure.

Re:I laugh at Microsoft.

[mattmentecky]

Google makes money by prioritising quality. Microsoft makes money by prioritising money.

As a publicly traded company, Google's priority is delivering returns to investors, just like Microsoft's, don't fool yourself for a second into believing that not to be true. What I think you are trying to say is how Google and Microsoft get to that common priority.

Re:Silly, silly boys (and girls)

[Binestar]

IMO the true test would be to take his site which is hosted on Apache, move it to being hosted on IIS and watch and see if his ranking goes up or down after the next time it is indexed.

Re:Absolutely

[zero_offset]

MSN has your example listed as #2 at the moment.
It comes out #6 on AskJeeves and Teoma, and #5 on Gigablast.

My god, CONSPIRACY!

In fact, the only place I could find where you come out #1 is on AOL.

Re:IIS imperial domination

[secolactico]

MSN Search should be banned for being dishonest.

Banned from where and by whom?

MSN search can do whatever they like. I don't know anybody who actually uses it. Even non-tech oriented people that use IE (against recommendations) set their startup page to something else. Google, mostly, but also "My Yahoo" and their webmail or portal of preference.

You don't need to assume malice.

[argent]

Remember, the guys working on the MSN search engine certainly use IIS to host their intranet sites, and whatever internal webservers they use to test against are probably IIS as well, at least in the most cases. They are likely to consider bogus results for their own sites (both internal and external) more critical... that's not malice, that's just human nature. Even if they consciously work against that, they're more likely to notice problems there first.

And search engine tweaking is more an art than a science. It's an evolutionary process, with feedback loops and strange attractors. So if there's any difference in the behaviour or design of Apache or IIS that would be visible to a search engine, it's likely to lead to a slight bias in favor of the server software that the servers they pay more attention to run.

Do we see a significant effect? Is it just chance?

[davids-world.com]

Sounds plausible at first, but if you look at his figures you see that the author didn't run a lot of queries, and that the difference between the google/Netcraft and the MSN ratios for Apache vs. IIS is not huge (68:20 vs 64:26).

Leads me to think: is it significant? That is, can we exclude (to a reasonable certainty, that is, p>0.95) the possibility that the effect seen cannot be attributed to chance or some other criterion MSN uses?

Ivor says at some point The initial set of words indeed showed a significant difference between the results from Google and the results from the Beta MSN search..

But what does he mean? I would be interested in what kind of significance test was applied, what the exact results were. Just looking at the ratio of percentages doesn't tell me enough... One should go back at the original data (seems provided, good) and check if the effect is actually trustworthy or just, in Ivor's words, "Odd. Pure coincidence perhaps."

Before seeing some analysis of significance, I don't believe anything...

No, you THINK about TFA

[FunWithHeadlines]

"Perhaps the MSN spider is taking advantage of some specific IIS features to provide enhanced indexing?"

In other words, there are some explanations out there other than "MS is biased and there's a conspiracy and they are trying to take over the world"... "

It's called plausible deniability. "Why, no, we had no idea this would happen. You say it's an interaction with an IIS feature that causes this to happen? Heavens to Betsy, we never thought of that."

Microsoft people aren't stupid, and they ARE trying to take over the computer world, or haven't you been paying attention to what they say and what they have done? The engineers that built MSN Search would certainly be aware of any interaction that fits with IIS features to provide enchanced indexing. They would have been all over it from the beginning. And a side-effect means that IIS sites come out higher? Great! It's a feature that benefits us, they would think.

Of course MS is biased. Of course they would have noticed this. Of course they like it.

Re:Silly, silly boys (and girls)

[b1t r0t]

Actually, what would be even better is to 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.

Re:Nobody uses MSN. This is a perfect example of w

[DoktorTomoe]

Then, in 2007, came Longhorn, with integrated web search using not Google, but MSN. Joe Sixpack didn't care, but MSN was so damn convinient he forgot about Google - effectively forcing Google Inc. with its costly development department out of business. Later - oh surprise - all results you got for "Linux" on MSN were advisories to ditch it for Windows. He who controlled the search result, controlled the industry. (Maybe I should put some fake Frontpage-Meta-Header to my webpages to increase Rankings on MSN ... just to be sure)

Re:IE bias too

[birge]

This is pretty ridiculous. There is no way to account for the million other variables that could confound this, such as:

1) Maybe it is Google discriminating *against* IIS, not Microsoft for.

2) Maybe there is a correlation between things like website type (i.e. corporate vs. .org) and use of IIS, and MSN is discriminating for or against that other, correlated variable.

Now I'm convinced it's nothing...

[birge]

Thanks for the link to the original. However, now I'm even more convinced it's nothing! Look at the variation between the four engines: the MSN results actually don't stand out, even though they are the lowest for Apache. For example, there is more difference between Google and Teoma than between Google and MSN. So, are we going to accuse the other search engines of manipulation, too? They exhibit the same level of variation from the apparently unquestionable Google reference.