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Microsoft Claims Worlds Best Search Engine Soon
kw writes "Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google in six months in the United States and Britain followed by Europe, its European president said on Wednesday. "What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google," said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa. That timing would presumably coincide more or less with the launch of Vista."
maybe Vista will have a default link to this site for everything that you do in Vista, more or less like the trick in IE now where any misspelling will lead you to msn search by default. That way you'll get the "more hits than google" allright. Still won't make you a good search engine though.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
- Bright people working for them
- msnbot has been crawling as much as googlebot for well over a year
Put those two together: a good source of data and a bunch a bright people and you should be able to build a great search engine. I've been waiting for MSN to turn up the juice for a while now. I've recently been seeing some signs of it, I don't doubt there are better things to come.Until three months ago, microsoft search seemed to favor front pages of sites to a ridiculous degree. Most of the traffic to the sites I monitor came in from the msn search engine to the front page. This was despite the fact that the crawler had visited scores of sub-pages. The only reason I can think of for this is that branded search terms would probably give better results. If you search for the name of a company, you would almost be certain to get their home page. It was almost no good for finding facts though. Recently this has begun to change and sub-pages are starting to see hits referred from msn search.
I'm hoping that Yahoo picks things up too. With their recent purchase of del.icio.us, they have another fairly substantial datasource of popularity of pages. I'm hoping that they start giving Google a run for their money as well. I'm less optimistic with them though as their relevency team seems to be out of touch with users such as myself. They seem to highly favor in-house content over better external content and they seem to think that much of what people search for is items to purchase rather than facts or even product reviews.
they just have to patch the new IE shipped with Vista so that it redirects everything from Google to OurNewMSN.com ... provided that they're able to ship Vista in such large numbers that this move is relevant, anyway...
So perhaps maybe Microsoft can build a search engine solution that is "better" than Google. Of course, there's no way to know until it is useable.
However - and this is big - how can Microsoft change the habits and behavior of many millions of users? Google has almost become synonymous with "web search" in the hearts and minds of millions. Particularly among the folks under 20 (lots and lots of people in my life), the phrase "Google it" is used maybe more than once a day. I like to use much of Google as it is - familiar, reliable (as much as I need it to be), and always extremely quick.
Can Microsoft become more important and more used than Google? I guess anything's possible, but I think time might tell us otherwise.
A Passionate Independent Musician
I would love it if Google just banned some sites from appearing on their search results, like about.com. This would improve there service.
AltaVista ?
"However - and this is big - how can Microsoft change the habits and behavior of many millions of users?"
AltaVista used to be *the* search engine a long time ago. So you could go back a few years and ask the same question about Google.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Forgive me for sounding cynical, but we've been hearing a steady stream of these announcements for years now from multiple companies.
If they were going to have a search engine better than Google, they would just do it, not announce it 6 months in advance. What, do they think that we need to prepare for this momentous event? Like our society isn't ready for a search engine of this power yet, so they need to warn us 6 months in advance to give us time to prepare?
Stop making announcements and do it already.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
In vista (in IE7, actually), everytime you enter a url in the browser, the browser sends the url to microsoft to know if the url is safe or not
This is sold as a "phising protection" - microsoft has a list of "bad" sites and the browser will know when you're being a victim of phising.
On the other hand, this is also a useful trick to know what pages are visiting the 90% of the world population, a really interesting data source for a search engine.