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Microsoft Hopes Prizes Will Attract New Searchers
BertieBaggio writes "Remember the long-running e-mail hoax that had Bill Gates testing an "e-mail tracing program" and offering to pay recipients big bucks if they passed his test e-mail along to all their friends? Well, the offer is true, sort of. Microsoft wants you to use its search engine, and it's got $1 million worth of prizes up for grabs for those who nibble at the offer. Following Yahoo's recent consideration of offering prizes to searchers, is this another tactic to lure users away from Google with candy and other shiny things?"
I ain't falling for this again. I've sent in about 20 of those damn e-mails and haven't got a thing from Bill.
You can fool me once, twice, heck.... even 20 times. But twenty-one? Heck no! I'm not as dumb as I look (and my mommy tells me I look pretty dumb).
Now, I have to get back to my e-mail and find out what funny, amazing thing will happen when I forward this e-mail to 18 of my closest friends... I only have 5 minutes to do it.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Apple is doing something similar with the iTunes Music Store Billion Song Countdown, and I don't think they giving away prizes to try and lure users away from Napster.
Strangers always have the best candy.
What is the quality of MSN's search engine like? Does it rival that of Google?
Indeed, Microsoft does have the resources to create a very powerful product, but that is often not what is done, as shown by many of their past products.
Then again, I'll use whatever search engine returns the best results, regardless of what prizes they might be offering searchers. The prizes would have to be pretty significant for me to want to put up with what may be lower-quality searches.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It's so useful they have to pay you to use it.
Damn... Just when I expected another dirty trick from Microsoft...
What we need is another search engine that isn't under the control of any one group. I'm not sure how this would be possible though, but with how these companies have caved in with censorship, we need a search engine that can't be controlled in such a way, like the internet can not be controlled effectively.
I really have no idea how this could be achieved but having the search engines under the control of these corporations has proven bad for the interests of the public, well the Chinese public at the moment, but there is nothing that would make it very difficult for other governments to have their countries search results censored.
There is mozdex which seems to be an open-source (I think it uses java though, so I wouldn't really say it's free-software) search engine project. But it's probably again open to the same form of abuse, being under the control of one entity, I believe.
I really hope that Google doesn't jump on this bandwagon. I'd much rather see them invest any prize money towards making their system better. $1 million isn't much to a company like Google, but that's still enough to pay a number of developers and researchers for even a year's worth of development and innovation.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Remember FreePC?
No details on how this works but can turn loose a perl/lwp script and let it run all night and wake up a winner! Something tells me they have thought of this angle.
Does google deliberately ignore links to other search engines?
It would be a riot to find a 'winning search' somewhere in Google's cached pages.....
What is the minimum amount of money, or the minimum prize, that you would have to receive in order to use a search engine that may return suboptimal results?
For me, I don't know if any prize that is likely to be offered would be worth putting up with less than ideal search results.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
you have to bribe people to use it instead of the competition.
I'm sorry but using prizes to get people to use your search engine means you obviously don't have the technology to lure people. When something can't become popular by word of mouth it probably isn't that great. When someone has to GIVE you something to use their service, then it must be pretty bad.
Will I win a prize if I use their engine to find new open-source programs? : )
The Microsoft mindset can be summed up in four words: You can buy anything.
It doesn't matter what it is you want; maybe you want to control a market, maybe you want to manufacture a quality video game console, maybe you want to create a public perception that you are a good company, maybe you want to be found innocent of breaking the law. For all problems, there is exactly one solution, and it always works: throw money at the problem. If this doesn't work, then increase the amount of money you throw.
Here we see the logical end conclusion of this kind of thinking. In this case, what Microsoft wants is users for its mediocre also-ran search engine. And the way they are attaining this is to simply buy some, by paying people to use their search engine.
Google isn't the only search engine?!?!?
I find that although many people are liberal in beliefs, they are conservative in actions.
Forget my earlier post. This one's GOTTA be ligit!
Be right back... gotta fire up Outlook!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I honestly wonder if the million in prizes makes up for the extra time collectively people spend trying to find the information they need instead of Googling it in the first place?
I ate your fish.
I'm an understanding fellow.
I understand fanatic thought.
I attributed roughly 90% of all 'slashvertisement' accusations as such. Fanatics who can't understand that sometime, yeah, its a sales pitch AND information...and even the more delicate nature of balancing financial interest versus blatant soul-less advertisting versus keeping the site alive. (they gotta pay for my favorite blog/news site somehow)
I never really saw it like this before. I just did, and it breaks my heart a little.
The most blatant astroturfing I have ever seen on slashdot.
Could that article summary have been worded any more loaded? Sure, a vast majority of us realize what it is and wouldn't waste our time...but out of the tens and tens of thousands that are on here regularly (hundreds of thousands occasionally)....perhaps much more than that even..... but...if only 10% of all people click on that link and sign up, well....that's stil a metric shit-ton of people....and with language like that I'm surely being conservative.
Sorry for the rant, mod me off into oblivion.... I just.... had to tell somebody... ~Dan
But I didn't win :(
This post patent pending.
I wonder if Microsoft will make or offically endorse a Firefox search add-on or toolbar for this special promotional version of the MSN search site? They might actually get some additional search traffic from Firefox users if they promoted one, since most Firefox users use the search box when they're looking for something. I usually leave my search box on the Google default, but I also added the A9 one recently to get that 1.57% amazon.com discount.
In short, Microsoft should offer more 3rd party browser support if they really want MSN search to be taken seriously.
While not result = "Congratulations!" and x Dictionary.SumOfEntries
Submit(Dictionary.Entry.X)
X=X+1
End While
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Is this that kind of games child play that have good and bad prizes. If it is I think a few people already got prizes from Microsoft and Yahoo.
On the "good prizes" side, Google gave China a better firewall.
$1,000,000 is a good investment, since the value they get from data mining is worth a lot more than that. The more people searching, the more accurate the market research data will become. Companies pay premium for this type of info.
I tried once, but i guess "microsoft sucks" isn't a winner...
I entered "Microsoft is Best" as a search term. It came back and asked me:
"Were you looking for microsoft is the beast"
A study was done in the last year on the typical users of the major search engines. Google had the bulk of intelligent, young, and wealthy, Yahoo and Google split the average person, and MSN followed it up with mostly uneducated and low income. I suspect that some of Yahoo's will go to MSN for the prize, but Google's? Not likely. They are a bit brighter than that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
After 100 searches they gave me a voucher for a free copy of MS BOB.
A lot of pages we visit are pages we already visited in the past, a partial solution would be a Firefox extension that makes you own search engine while you browse.
...so what?
"Remember the long-running e-mail hoax that had Bill Gates testing an "e-mail tracing program" and offering to pay recipients big bucks if they passed his test e-mail along to all their friends? Well, the offer is true, sort of."
Which I read as "sort of false." What a lame attempt to compare a web promotion with a hoax. Please.
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
No one would use it if there wasn't some kind of shiny, sparkly prize involved. Why would they when there's Google?
Baldy: (grumbling about killing google - off camera) .. uh .. Google's
Bill : Steve, we need a new innovation.
Baldy: (grumbles about google search.. and killing it)
Bill : That's a great idea, we need a search engine! Like
Baldy: (erupting in a maniacal tantrum) I'll fucking kill Google! (throws chair)
Bill : I guess this has already been done... hey wait a minute. Google isn't *paying* anyone to use their search engine!! We can pay people to use our search engine!! What do you think Steve?
Baldy: (chewing on shoelaces, mumbling)
Bill : I think it's a splendid Idea! Release the prize hounds immediately!
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
reminds me of what Iwon was doing a few years ago. And it didn't work for them, so my guess is that this won't work for MSN.
On another note, the few times I used MSN search I found in some cases that it found what sites I was looking for within the first few pages where google was endlessly going through forum entries. I still don't like it over google but it does seem like it's getting better over time.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Even if I want, I can't use that search as atdmt.com is in my list of blocked sites :-) - that is where your searches first go...
OK, I've exaggerated a little bit since this isn't a Google-sponsored thing, but Blingo provides prizes for using them as your search engine (and the search engine is of course run through Google).
;-)
Now if you'll excuse me, I've just gotten the facts and need to convert my server that I've been running on Linux the past year or so for absolutely nothing to Windows Server 2003, since it's less expensive in the long run
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
"Must be 18 years or older and a U.S. resident to qualify".
For the rest of the world: move along, there is nothing to see.
The problem is you actually do want control of the search engine by one group. The reason for this is that search engines are not about finding a source for information. Search engines are about finding an authoritative source for information. If you just want sites about "skiing", well, there are thirty thousand of those. When you search, you want to pick the ten most important. Which are those? Well, we don't want our search under the control of any one group, so let's solve this democratically. What groups might be able to tell us what skiing sites are important? Well, there's thirty thousand authoritative sources on the subject of skiing right here, the skiing sites themselves, and every single one of them thinks they are the most important one.
Wait, that doesn't work at all. We now have thirty thousand equally important answers to our query, where we only wanted ten. What now?
The internet itself serves the goal of information sources not under the control of any one group. This is not what you want out of a search engine. Search engines assume information sources are plentiful, and attempt to provide a single, authoritative source which provides a singular value judgement as to which sources are most important. This value judgement cannot work democratically, because the information sources have a vested interest in promoting their information sources over other information sources whether their value is greater or not.
The only way to reconcile the philosophical desire for decentralization with the inherently centralized nature of search engines is to create projects which exist to collaboratively rate many sources. This goal is currently served by projects like dmoz, digg or stumbleupon. They unfortunately are only able to catalog a very small portion of the internet, because the raters are human beings, not robots like those that create the google index.
Ok, i just scared myself, i just thought i was on google *shivers*. Is there any part of there search results that isnt the same as googles? The colours, the links, the cache, the date, the adverts at the top, the adverts on the right, the youve got "14 billion results", the "it took 0.4 seconds in our amazing data center get your results for goatse". The navigation links suck, MSN own brand.
Microsoft isn't the only one.
See, that's why IWon.com now dominates the planet; they offered cash and/or prizes. :)
:)
It must be hell, being these guys- being sucessful with only two things, the Office software and their dwindling OS. They've tried to branch out, but their involvement is the kiss of death. WebTV, Sirius satellite, plush-toys...about the only thing they did well, outside their specialty is their hardware, which is actually good.
But who wants to have the Microsoft logo at their desk?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You get a Pi/2 (1.57%) discount at Amazon.com if you use the A9 search engine. No competition, everyone who uses it regularly gets it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's not exactly what it sounds like. I found the actual site, and you have to search the "winning keywords" that it generates for you. Such as "hiking" or "gourmet foods." I guess they realize if they had "naked Jessica Alba" as one of those options they'd give away all their prizes in half an hour.
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=censoring+chi na
>> it's got $1 million worth of prizes up for grabs for those who nibble at the offer.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that it's all Windows ME licenses.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
What's the big deal? Simpy has been giving away AdSense cash for a while now. Mike Arrington covered the topic on TechCrunch the other day.
Simpy
...and... well, you know... And see what they get.
MS knows traditional shrink-wrap software marketing better than anyone. It seems they realize this search engine stuff is a new ballgame, but they haven't quite figured out that emulating cheezy operators like iWon isn't the way to go. If I want to get pimped, I'll go down to Quickie Mart and play Lotto.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The parent is asking for a new search engine, why i am offtopic?
Congratulations, it appears we have a winner.
Also, the winning keywords have been cracked: and at least some of the "prizes" are nothing more than promotional tie-ins:
if only 10% of all people click on that link and sign up, well....that's still a metric shit-ton of people....and with language like that I'm surely being conservative.
Did you ever consider the fact that paying people to use your search engine is pathetic, and that's newsworthy? The only proof is to look at the promise. We can be sure Bill has pulled the usual retail price inflation to get the price up to one million dollars, but the idea is still the same.
One million fake prize dollars:
My favorite advert prizes are more adverts.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A good google search on a popular topic always takes two tries. The first try, you peruse the results and spot the obvious bogus crap. Next search add the minus symbol and the crap- -abcboguscrapstuffxyz, whatever the obvious spam terms and tricks are, you'll see them. Mash enter now. Zooba! Good results! Or at least a lot better. It removes all the crapola quickly. The deal is, before the first search you won't know what the spammers are using, but then you see it and can deal with it. Once you get used to it, it goes fast, certainly better than trying to look page after page for relevant and useful results. After that, "advanced search" is your friend, eventually you will use that instead of generic search, it just works better, a few moments thought and preps leads to getting exactly what you want much quicker.
The funniest ones though, on the first search when you get spammed, are the ADS on the side, especially generic eBay ads. Like once I was looking up something to do with antarctica, on the side: Icebergs! Get the best deals on icebergs at eBay, click here!
MSN's Incentivized Search Comedy
You can already get prizes for Google searching through Blingo.com - and not only do you get a prize randomly, anyone who signs up as your friend gets the same prize you win (and vice versa). That's all there is to it, they don't even ask for anything beyond name, email and zip code when you sign up. Click my homepage link to join as my friend so we can win prizes together.
Existing search engines that have a similar scheme only allow you to win on your first ten searches per day, or something along those lines, in order to prevent automated searching abuses.
Well, they *could* use IP-based blocking of more than ten tries a day.
In unrelated news, MIT has the entire 18.0.0.0/8 class A subnet...
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Any IT people try to search their knowledge base? Of course you have. Which means you probably know it's easier most of the time to type any error message in on Google, which usually finds the correct KB article.
Then again, hopefully their KB doesn't use the same engine as MSN.
Dear Bill,
I'd rather have my money back from my one purchase of Windows 95 for $80. I'd also like back my $300 purchase of Windows NT4. Microsoft owes me $160 on the two Windows 98 CDs I purchased, along with the $84 dollar Windows 98SE I bought which wiped out my OS/2 partition. I do have Windows 2000 PRO which I bought online for $120. Its OK for development, but it sucks at playing games.
I bought for $40, Windows 3.0. I have two original copies (twelve+ disks each) of Windows 3.11 at $45 apiece. When I had an ARCNET network here at home, I spent another $45 on Windows for Workgroups. I also own, all the original MS DOS floppys from 3.3 which I purchased legally (but I can't remember the price).
I spent $300 dollars on my copy of Office 6, and purchased the Office95 upgrade for $100. Now its worthless because you have changed the office formats.
Bill, Im not buying XP/Vista because I shouldn't have to ask your permission to install software I buy off the store shelf.
I'd like my money back. Stop giving prizes and give us what we paid for.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Am I the only one searching "google.com" over and over again?
Slashdotted!!
Unable to connect
Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at clk.atdmt.com.
* The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
* If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
* If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.
Ok, I was dubious about this, but at least I said "What the heck, let's give it a try, see how good the search engine is". Getting a "Can't Connect" result in my first try completely confirmed my doubts. I'm not using MSN Search ever again.
Marcos
"litigious bastards" goes where it should.
It even has a calculator: 2 + 2, but no unit conversion. Very limited constant support: "pi" works, but "pi + 2" doesn't.
Almost seems faster, but that could just be because it's more AJAXish than Google search.
I think the way Google presents results is cleaner, but maybe I'm just accustomed to it.
I dont know what the big deal is. I win stuff while browsing the web all the time! IPods, ring tones, xbox 360's. Often to claim the prize I will need to guess my favorite color (which I never get wrong) or verify that the following box is indeed flashing (which it has always been). I am also frequently the millionth viewer of a webpage, making my time spent online even more lucrative. You're probably astounded by my good luck and find it hard to believe, but it's true!
I had an interview with Google yesterday and they asked me how MS could "kill" Google. Ultimately the interview cornered me and made MSN search and Google search equal, and was like "Now what?". I jokingly said:
"Give away $1 millon per search, MS has $50 billion to burn.."
I better get the job now.
Like... who cares? i bet that even with all the people from slashdot trying to win the prize, nobody won. seriously, the odds of winning are so slim it's not worth typing the extra characters to get to www.msnsearchandwin.com. that's 9 more keystrokes than www.google.com. and the flash is takes forever to load, not to mention obnoxious.
It's a free sample!
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
I sure do remember that email. At one point I was receiving about 5-10 of them a day from people I knew. So I got fed up with it and proceeded to do something about it.
First I pulled out all the email addresses from all the copies I had saved (don't you just love it when people forward you stuff with headers nested 30 levels deep?) In total I had thousands of addresses to blind carbon copy. Then I sat down and started to write.
First, I explained the purpose of IVAP (the international virus awareness program*) and gave a brief history. I then explained how the email which was circulating was actually a virus which needed human help to propogate, and by simply opening the email, your computer could be infected. The virus was designed to delete random files on your hard drive, but due to a bug, it never actually removed anything. Disinfecting your computer from the virus was simple: remove all the files in C:\WINDOWS\TEMP, defragment your hard drive, and reboot.
I sent the email off through an anonymous remailer, and within minutes I received half a dozen forwards from both friends and people I barely knew with the forged virus alert. One friend even profusely appologized, saying, "I didn't know!"
A few months later I was sitting down with another friend talking about urban legends and the bill gates email came up. As he explained to me that it was really a virus and he had the instructions for how to get rid of it, all I could do was grin.
There are some things you just wish you'd kept around.
(*) I'm not sure if that's what I actually called the organization, but it really isn't important to the story.
try this.
you have to give it away for free and still get less than 3% market share!
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Searching for google itself found sooooooo many pages for google that I didn't even know existed.
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=GSM001&q=
Page 1 of 69,809,028 results containing google (0.09 seconds)
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
Use Google and win the right results to your query..... every time!
To win a prize you have to be over 18 and a resident of the U.S.
Just do what I did... Google it
;)
Why the hell do people keep bringing this censorship non-issue up? They. Did. Not. Take. Down. The. Uncensored. Version. You can still go to the Chinese language version of google.com and perform searches on anything from "Tibet" to "democracy" and find answers. This is as open to China as Google can make it; that is, Google leaves it open to Chinese customers, but the Chinese government itself does its best to impede web traffic to it. For the people that China successfully totally blocks from uncensored Google, they have provided Google.cn, on the theory that it's better than no Google at all. Explain to me how the censorship here is being practiced by Google, and not just solely by the Chinese government?
Ok, so I do Alt-F2 http://www.msnsearchandwin.com/ [ENTER], and konqueror shows me a blank page. OMG, they put so many meta tags into the source of the page, that they ran out of space for a non-javascript version. I mean, this was considered a pretty blunt mistake around 1998.
But I get the feeling that they don't want any Linux user to use it. It doesn't work with javascript enabled, either, not even in mozilla. Which begs the question why they promote it, if it doesn't work?
About 10 years, in the browser war, Mr Microsoft was giving stuff free to custeromes, to beat Netscape. 10 years later, the same Mr Microsoft is giving prize to customers, to beat Google. I cannot image what will happen 10 years from now. Will they give out stocks to customers?
Check out how long it took to return these results: clicky Unfortunately no win. Scoundrels.
~~~~~~~~~ "I must create my own system, or be enslav'd by another man's." William Blake, Jerusalem.
In the words of Wally..."I'm going to go code myself and RV!"
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Will someone give me the email id of Bill Gates or the head of search engine. I would like to present some ideas to improve search. Thankx Anshu
1. They have a "loading" bar that I suppose they think explains why it takes >10 seconds to display a search box. 2. Their page disables the "Alt-left-arrow" sequence that I use to go back. Awesome. 3. They capitalize "search". i.e. "The more you Search, the more chances to Win" If those things are important to you, I highly recommend their search.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
ALL competitions are run to make money.
Profits for corporations OR cash for charities.
Do the arithmetic :
amount of cash 'given' away VS marketing costs to evangelise M$ + costs to Beta test search engine
People who sign up to this and who don't win anything will be working for nothing.
People who sign up to this and who do win something will be taking the other person's pay cheque.
Why would a corporation who's sole/soul AIM is to make PROFIT and FORCE Gate's megalomaniac 'vision'
upon the world do anything that loses them ca$h in the end ?
Tell me please do.
Why to use MSN: search for "Microsoft Illegal Acts" in both google and MSN. With Google, you get a bunch of stuff about the Netscape complaint and illegal business practices. With MSN you get stuff about Bush doing illegal acts, file copying, etc.
When IE 4 came out, there was a Midnight Madness promotion where you'd get a free t-shirt if you were one of the first million(?) people who downloaded IE 4. I fell for that and never heard anything. Fast forward to 2005 and Opera has a similar promotion where the CEO will swim the Atlantic. I fell for that.
Fool me thrice? Don't think so. It's a gimmick that may have some people give MSN a shot, but the bottom line is always gonna lie w/ the user experience. Are they finding what they're looking for? Do they have to wade through a clunky user interface or countless "sponsored results" to find what they're looking for?
Now in reflection, I'm starting to see why I'm so cynical! Thanks, Internet!
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
All traffic from that search page is routed through http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/mgcssusa0030000003gbl/ direct/01/?q=searchphrase which doesn't really make sense to me. Why would Microsoft do something like that? Secondly, the Official Rules state that you can enter by searching at http://search.msn.com/ which is my preferred method now that I know I cannot search through http://www.msnsearchandwin.com/ without going through atdmt.com. Unfortunately, the Official Rules say:
'When the Web Results of your Web Search are displayed, click the "MSN Search and Win" link located in the "Sponsored Sites" box on the Web Results page presented to determine if you are a winner.'
So this means that someone could have purchases a whole lot of phrases and been put into the sponsored links area. Try a search at search.msn.com and see if you can find the link they are talking about. I searched, 'fast cars' and no such link appeared.
Is this a hoax?
"Man wins $1 million for searching MSN for goatse."
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Once you find out you've won, you have 10 minutes to give them your shipping information before you're disqualified. Prizes will be shipped in about 90 days, after verification of eligibility. Refer to the Official Rules for more information.
They're nice Bots, they're willing to donate all their winnings to me.
Apparently M$ doesn't care about the opinions of non-US residents. We're not eligble for the prizes. Perhaps that's a good thing, given that 4 out of 4 searches I tried with it timed out unsuccessfully.
It doesn't work properly on my linux box :(
Stupid flash. It must be there to prevent (well, make more difficult) scripted atatcks.
Please insert the words "American residents" between 'those' and 'who'.
Microsoft aren't giving the rest of the world diddley-squat.
1. Don't put anything but the search box and a few important navigation links on the search page.
2. Make it lightweight so it loads in less than a second.
3. Save the ads and promos and articles and come-ons for the search results page.
Google, AskJeeves and some other sites know what they're doing by having a sparse home page.
MSN's home page is an elaborate news/sports/stocks portal. The visitor feels like he is the tool being used, rather than the other way around. Yahoo isn't much better.
Edith Keeler Must Die
(or the rest of the world I guess) Contest is only available to U.S. residents..
Google sucks too for that matter!
Getting old fast, Shit!