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Microsoft To Launch 'Question' Site
prostoalex writes "Microsoft will try to make the search process more social, Business Week reports, by creating a question-and-answer Web site. They certainly are entering a quite crowded niche." From the article: "It's one of the many ways that Web companies, including Yahoo and Google, are trying to set themselves apart with social search, a targeted pursuit of information that's influenced by the preferences of a person's peer group. Social search is a method whose time has come, Osmer says. Microsoft research shows that generic search engines can't answer 50% of queries asked, he says. The new tool, whose name he didn't disclose, will be 'one of the larger projects for us' this year, Osmer says."
Hopefully not amateursexchange.com. Sounds like pain.
Fleur de Sel
maybe there will ba a Q and A about the ms licensing fiasco...
Has anyone ever used one of these answer services?
Its probably more suited toward generic questions than technical questions.
Seems like niche forums/mailing lists are where most of the action is. Not sure what search engines are trying to accomplish here.
SecurityPub.com
There are so many questions to ask about this...my first response is that attempts to make information more friendly don't seem to have that great of a track record. Does anyone remember "Ask Jeeves"? Compare how its interface competed with the super-minimalist interface of google.
Anyway, there is this one quote:
Microsoft research shows that generic search engines can't answer 50% of queries asked, he says.
What type of questions were they asking it? Were they factual questions, like "What is the Capital of Burundi?", or were they process oriented questions, such as "How can you make cookies that are not too hard, but are cooked all the way through?" The first question, if you type "capital Burundi" into google, you get an answer for. Trying to search for information on the second would be much harder, I imagine.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
> targeted pursuit of information that's influenced by the preferences of a person's peer group.
Excuse me, but when I am looking for information, finding only what my peers think is good for me is the last thing I would want. Social conformity is the death of truth.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
This has always been the best place to ask questions.
SecurityPub.com
Why do you suck so much?
Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward
>Social search is a method whose time has come, Osmer says.
Coming from Microsoft, this sounds like a threath to me, heehee...
I have the answer.
NO!
Here goes... Why doesn't Microsoft dedicate resources to finish Vista instead of doing things that are already being handled well by others.
Maybe shashdot should do this as well!
We could call it "ask slashdot"!
Once again we see the excellent innovations coming from micrisoft!
So Taco what do you think?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
but will it have the linux HOWTOs.
Haven't librarians been doing this since time out of mind? I don't see what all the hoopla is about. Ask a librarian and you'll get good, timely, factual information and a lot of it. Ask one of these services and I shudder to think what you'll get.
Not to be a Redmond basher (well... I am).... but are they going to produce something innovative sometimes?
Because it seems that microsoft shut down the R&D department so long ago. Or maybe they never had one...
Probably they have a C&P department... who knows?
-- "If A equals success, then the formula is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." - Einstein
My first question will be when is ACS coming out? The release of this product is becoming synonymous with Duke Nukem Forever.
The filtering and social assumptions in searches seems to be the problem, not the answer.
Under Google's leadership, real raw search capabilities have regressed, and we are supposed to be happy with Google interpreting a simple search in a way that supposedly makes most searchers happy (happy compared to what?).
IMO, before further filters and dumbing-down are useful, you need a powerful basic search engine that allows you to ask advanced search questions.
Of course, this sort of open capability of search engines might reduce Google's proprietary control of the searches.
What if you could do a honest search that did not factor in the prior popularity of the site, but relied on other criteria, so that a new site with unique content might have a chance of getting found? What if you could make advanced characterizations of the sort of content you were looking for? What if any third party could make these characterizations for you so there could be competition in usage of the dominant search engines -- for example a better Froogle produced by just formulating advanced Google searches for users.
What's the last digit of pi, as best as can determined?
M5 Unit...working
I used to get answers for all my life-changing questions from it!
Is Steve Balmer really a monkey?
if this type of "social search" is anything new, it could be hot. take something like multiply or myspace, blend in the hardware and software geeks that hang out here, it could be hot.
Experts Exchange is the most worthless tech site ever, for 1 reason:
Their policy.
I don't like seeing your results on my google searches, and teasing me with a question, and no answer.
I don't want to register, I don't like 'hit and run' registering.
I don't like you.
So what I did instead... is signed up for a google account, and filtered your site out of all of my searches.
COMPLETELY.
And guess what I'm doing?
I'm getting my answers elsewhere. For free. With no, god knows what privacy problem, registrations.
Experts Exchange... eat me.
I wonder if microsoft has finally met a market they cannot buy, strongarm, or sue themselves into. Seems they are worried about being left behind and trying to wedge themselves into the search engine market any way they can. Maybe they are just finding it harder to make people think they are the only game in town.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
It is 3 if you write the digits in order of ascending significance.
It is 1 (or 0 depending upon when you quit writing implied 0's) if you write it in base Pi. There are many other competent representations that have a last digit
In base 10 descending order, it is foo.
Or were you just asking to be rhetorical?
If a question doen't has answers(i assume they will get to answer alot).reformulate question into terms search engines understand.
:"How do fish swim"
How do fish swim? google:fish swimming
Or if you are confident it has real answers: Just
Though it filtersvaluable information too.
Why did you release the 360 knowing it could heat a 10x12 room.
Ant
Search Engine Marketing
http://www.degraeve.com/magiceightball/
But I guess the problem with newsgroups is that their nntp protocol doesn't give make enough provision for advertising. Yes, that's one reason I like it.
Yeah great idea, they'll probably patent it :)
A lot of times, especially in work environments, knowing what your peers think is very important. Whenever we're talking about some kind of new project or device or program or whatever, the first thing I do is figure out what the standard, accepted way of doing things is. Most of the time, and especially in terms of technology, the approach of a majority of your peers is going to be the best-documented and -supported approach.
Thinking outside the box is always nice, but it's important to know where the box is and have a good reason for rejecting what others have done before you.
Yahoo's answers service is very neat - large community, quick replies and decent indexing. it's, AFAIK, the model solution for social search where you can ask arbitrary questions with no efficient formatting and still get results (if not a definitive answer) - because, let's face it, software (search engines) hasn't evolved to the level of understanding that a human has.
My sig has been answered.
It's 42. The hard part is knowing the question.
hey you guys! one guy posted that you have to register in order to read the experts exchange website > no you don't!
All you have to do is scroll down and scroll down the page, past all of the ads, and THEN the thread starts! I don't really think they are "experts" if all you do to read the thread is to just scroll down the entire page - pretty STUPID to me!
also, one last thing on 'real search questions'.. i think MS and that are trying to match your question theory with an answer - most websites don't really PUT the question first - they usually just give you the answer - that is why searching is so difficult.. if websites had more text on them, and they actually wrote questions and answers on them, then searching might be a tiny bit easier. I hope that webmasters out there should be more conscious of what phrases, questions and answers that they write on their website. hopefully that might improve searching a WHOLE lot better!
Go Orion search!
http://www.psychopanic.com
How can I configure so that it doesn't crash at inconvenient times, so that it doesn't need a dozen security updates every month, and so that it will work like marketing claims it will?
Where can I find linux?
Why does Vista look so much like OS X?
The new tool, whose name he didn't disclose, will be 'one of the larger projects for us' this year, Osmer says."
Without Vista or Office being released this year, I suppose Vole had to release at least something. Unfortunately for Microsoft this is another prime example of follow the leader. I sincerely hope that Microsoft will start developing their own products instead of quereying Google Answers "What other products do you have the we should make?".
The two things that appear to spur adoption in IT products Innovation and Monopoly. Monoposoft has the one figured out.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
A lot of beginners have problems coming up with good search terms, so I usually tell someone just starting out that they should try entering a plain english question before they try to get too fancy with their searches.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
... in the MS Office help as reference, I would estimate the service will sucessfull answer 0% of my questions.
The only way to find something there is via the keyword search. If it doesn't work on content where they have controll over the content, I can't imagine it working when they don't have controll over the content
I'm glad you're willing to accept "As best as can be determined". We don't have the exact digit yet, but the latest work has narrowed down the last digit of pi to a fairly small set of digits. At this point, it's looking as though the last base-10 digit of pi is either 4, 6, or 2. However, analysis indicates that it could also be 9, 5, or 1. Finally, there's a chance that it could be 8, 3, 0, or 7. So we don't know exactly, but we're pretty sure it's one of those.
What's that you say? Pi has no last digit? Don't be silly, that would mean the digits just go on forever!
The biggest flaw of google is the lack of filtering options for the search. I want to do things like "only search this type of sites", where type can be shopping-eu, shopping-us, educational...
And they should really have an option for blacklisting those blasted sites that contains a whole lot of keywords, but no contents. Particularly certain xxx sites are famouse for such sites.
You are entitled to your opinions, but most people think Google's Pagerank goes a long way to forfilling Google's mission, to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The system does allow for "advanced search question" of course and most people get what they are looking for. Numerous attempts to manipulate the results have failed, as should be obvious every time you pull up a page of results that's not covered with porn and other spam.
Microsoft's search results and filtering practices have been questioned before. Their mission is to make as much money as possible by any means. Their results are generally filtered along those lines, which further reduces the value of their already inferior algorithms. Even if M$ were allowed to use better algorithms or invented one superior to Pagerank, their basic nature would ruin it. An astroturfer like M$ is going to try and turn everything into it's own advertisement and you can never trust anything they do.
Yes, Google has a patent on it's algorithm and software patents are bad. The control Google has over Pagerank, however, does nothing to reduce the quality of results.
What if you could do a honest search that did not factor in the prior popularity of the site, but relied on other criteria, so that a new site with unique content might have a chance of getting found?
You do realize that you can find "unpopular" and "undiscovered" sites on Google by starting on page 20 of the results, don't you? When you have 100,000 sites to work with, you can be sure that you have not heard of 99,990 of the results.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Why?
Why?
and the ever so popular, Why?
The feature will let users direct questions to a specific universe, such as a group of friends, rather than to get automated lists of results from a generic search engine.
Forums anyone?
Wouldnt that be the entire microsoft.com domain?
Ever tried to browse their web page... and now they have one for questions?
The web is becoming redundant...
4 ;-)
It's free too, just needs some more users.
Categorize all knowledge?
1.Identify Knowledge Domain (The field)
2.Indentify category of Question(The subject)
3.Remove ambiguous data which can change
for similar questions of this domain.
4.Search for matching Data sources in the Category,With subject only.
5.refine search by looking up it in the data source(*which is usually site dedicated to knowledge domain question asked).
Of course searching a Book by its visual appearance or Pumpkin carving "craft" in
google is useless.
We need a way to search data By tags or categories.Classify the web sites.
Something like Dmoz.org just Larger,User-friendly,MUlti-category and Wiki-like features.Sort of WikiWeb.
Why is there a picture of you in the defilition of "asshole" on wikipedia?
I am a first year doctor and am specializing in proctology. If that is what I have to look forward to, I think I should change professions now.
Microsoft is not the answer.
Microsoft is the question.
No is the answer.
questionville.com
The problem is Microsoft internal culture. They live from review to review which comes every June. Long term success of your project is irrelevant and orthogonal to this process - what matters is (in the order of importance):
1. Short term "visibility" (MSFT term) before the review. If you're not visible, you won't be promoted, given a bonus, or recognized as someone who does the job. Doing a good job is not enough. In fact you don't even have to do a good job for as long as you're "visible".
2. Not saying anything stupid (like "this fucking sucks, we need to re-do it or cut the feature" in front of a program manager who came up with the idea)
3. Doing things on schedule (even if what's done is crap no one wants to buy).
Notice, that long term success or customer satisfaction is nowhere to be found in these criteria. Now add a hefty dose of bureucracy (like 150 VPs, half a dozen directors for the team of 100, more PMs than developers, people whose job is nothing but sending out status emails to each other, etc.) and you'll see why this behemoth is doomed long term. Now, how long a term that is is up for debate, but I'd give it 10 years top, unless drastic pruning of bureaucracy is done. Which will never happen, because bureaucracy is most effective at protecting itself.
it will provide more questions than answers.
isnt the knowelge base and MSDN not enough?
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
I'm tired of all of the things meant to make searching the web easier- I would like something more effective. What I would love to see is a search engine that will allow me to search using a combination of regular expressions and something that perhaps resembles SQL.
It seems to me that too many people focus on making things "easier" when we should be focusing on making them "better' and let the users learn how to use things properly instead of molly-coddling them.
Microsoft seems to be the worst about this, but it seems to run through too many applications.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
.
(n/t)
Which is why google is designed for idiots who do not know how to search for something better. But for non-idiots who want something better, you would get something better than what is offered now.
You do realize that you can find "unpopular" and "undiscovered" sites on Google by starting on page 20 of the results, don't you? When you have 100,000 sites to work with, you can be sure that you have not heard of 99,990 of the results.
Duh. The point is being able to get the site you want without having to manually search through the 20 pages of junk.
That you would even make such a suggestion that this is how someone looking for something based on a non-popularity-contest criterion -- advanced searching -- should have to find it using Google shows how badly deficient the mindset of the Google fanboys is.