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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?"
It does indeed, however generally I search Google first and if it fails me I'll try MSN, Teoma, Alltheweb, etc. In my observation, Google tends to be manipulated by malicious SEO more readily, but I think this may be due to the fact that they are such a huge, juicy target for SEO firms. The smaller, less popular engines are less likely to be targetted specifically by SEO, though generic SEO techniques still affect them.
In general, the freshness of MSN's index rivals that of Google. I think both of them tend to feature new sites more prominently, but I'm not sure exactly how much of this is my imagination.
Most major search engines offer a very clean interface these days as well, and MSN is no exception. However, MSN isn't advertising anywhere near as aggressively as Google is.
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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.
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.
Iwon is still alive and kicking. Just waiting for somebody to buy them up. I don't use MSN search, but I've noticed that most of the people that reach my blog from a search engine are coming from MSN. Them seem to index even little ol' me very quickly.
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.
As a general rule of thumb, the top search result on MSN normally sucks, which tends to give you the immediate impression that the search engine is lacking, but if you look past that, it gets better quick. To my experience, MSN Search will normally contain the responses of the first page of Google's search across its first two pages of search results. Filling in the rest of those first two pages is normally about 50% useless pages, and 50% pages that are actually quite good matches that Google doesn't list until many pages later. When search for products, you'll find that companies tend to play games with Google's search results, and as such, MSN's can often be better. When searching for time sensitive items, Google seems much more responsive, which is both good and bad. Clearly, the responsiveness can be good when the thing you are searching for is very fresh, but at the same time, current events can often heavily skew what you would consider to be the expected results. For instance, if you search for "thyroid cancer", you would expect your first page to be lists of medical encyclopedia's, maybe a support group or two. However, if the day before some famous actor or musician announced they had thyroid cancer, the first page of Google's results has a tendency to be skewed towards that news.
MSN search also answers direct questions more consistently. On occasion, Google can give you some Answer blocks that are just plain wrong. In my experience, I haven't ever gotten an answer block from MSN that has been incorrect factually.
On the other hand, its kinda fun to search for Microsoft products on MSN search. The top result is NEVER the official website. On Google, it basically always is, which I would consider the proper result, but like I said, the top result in MSN is almost always crap.
I'd say once MSN manages to purge about 20% of their crap results, they might become my search engine of choice.
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.
As an aside, this is why I'd always make sure that a website worked with Safari and Firefox. Whilst they are small percentages, they are predominantly people who are younger, wealthier or more tech aware, which generally means more disposable income..
That's my strategy too, I search on Google first and if that fails I try MSN search.
So far, I have never tried MSN search.