Slashdot Mirror
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.
isomerica.net | Foonetic IRC
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 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..