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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
you have to bribe people to use it instead of the competition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.