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Yahoo Rejects Microsoft Search Offer
mytrip writes to mention a Financial Times article detailing Microsoft's apparent interest in Yahoo!, and Yahoo!'s rude reaction to their interest. From the article: "The fight is on between the three internet search titans, after Yahoo's Terry Semel laid down the gauntlet to Microsoft saying the software giant's recently elevated ambitions in the search arena were a lost cause. 'My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance. The search business has been formed,' he said in an interview with the New Yorker's Ken Auletta."
The only search engine with less traffic than Microsoft's is AOL's, and a number of more obscure ones.
Yahoo is receiving more than twice their traffic, and likely ad revenue potential as well.
There'd be a lot to win for Microsoft if joining forces with Yahoo, but I'm not sure Yahoo would sacrifice their image. If their managers have any sense, they know it's important to preserve your identity, especially if you're quite far ahead.
This just looks like a cry for help from Microsoft's side, now that their second (?) "Google Killer" with "Live Search" (a very idiotic name too; why not "Microsoft Search"?) has probably failed just as bad as their updated MSN Search they did a few years back.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Microsoft's business is Office and Windows. Those make a ton of $$$$.
Microsoft loses money on almost everything else.
Every market they've tried to move into and make money on, they've failed.
They did pretty well against Netscape - giving away the browser seemed to kill their market completely, and thus kill Netscape. But Microsoft didn't make money on that. They lost money and killed a competitor.
But Google has a different model. They run internet advertising on the back of the best internet search engine. Microsoft cannot give away search for free, Google already does that. They can entice users to use their own search, but users used Google before when they had to find it.
It is easy to forget pre-Google searches. Every search engine was MILES behind Google. They came along, and all of a sudden you could find what you wanted. They intelligently leveraged that into becoming the Internet advertising leader.
Still, Microsoft could get a chunk of the market if
1) the next IE has an MSN search box built in
2) defaults to MSN homepage
3) And MSN search rivals Googles in its ability to return good results
I think that is the looming battle. Microsoft needs more leverage from IE, and a better search engine. And they will spend whatever it takes to get the latter. Google, meanwhile, is probably locking down IP on internet searching as much as they can.
That's a little different from what Yahoo has done. Yahoo gave them a forum to reveal themselves, under the assumption that they were safe to express their opinion. And then sold them out to the authorities. That is far more odious than just shutting down the forum and not providing a phony 'free speech' honeypot.
maybe that quote will be added to the list of such memorables as:
640k ought to be enough for anyone
computers of the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons
and my favorite
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers
even the magic 8 ball has an opinion on email clients: Outlook not so good.
Scaling this can get a bit tricky, but that has really already been solved by all current major search engines.
And here is the premise with which we disagree.
Google does a good job, but it's difficult to find what you're looking for in any of the other major search engines.
And I'm positive you can't get results like theirs with simple bayesian filtering.
What you don't seem to be grasping is that search is artificial intelligence. It's saying "given these search parameters, what am I REALLY looking to find?"
Here's a really good example I just thought up. Try looking for "explosive materials."
That's a very general subject - I could be looking for where to buy them, or what they are, or the definition, or... What I would probably like to get back with such a general subject on that are authoritative pages that can point me to information about them so that I can narrow down my interest. This would be the logical thing to get back if your search engine is smart enough not to just search for the words "explosive" and "materials."
So take a look at the difference in results between MSN and Google. The top pages on Google are what I would want - references that talk about explosives in general. MSN's look suspiciously like someone went through and found all the places that the words "explosive" and "materials" exist.
This level of specificity thing is just one area that shows how Google is winning. Search is the greatest attempt at artificial intelligence currently in existence, and a problem that is currently so open-ended and complex that it makes rocket science look like lego assembly.
But don't take my word for it. Go pick up a few books on AI. There are many, many problems related to search still unsolved.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You might say Microsoft's good at tedious, but you have to hand it to them: This time they're really trying something new. Where the other search engines tries to achieve quality and relevance trough variations of link cardinality, anchor text, page rank (how many and how highly valued pages links to a page), etc., Microsoft's trying neural networks and some kind of "artificial intelligence".
2 /483846.aspx (Robert Scoble's video inteview with the guys behind the search engine).
p anzee&FORM=QBRE
s et=1 and the image search http://www.live.com/#q=chimpanzee&scope=images&lod =2&page=results for examples.
So far MSN Search/Windows Live Search is worst of the three big players when it comes to relevance. But they're not too bad, either, and I think there's been a lot of improvement since they launched their beta last year (the beta was incredibly bad). If this "self learning" idea works out, MSN Search very well could become the best engine of them all.
See http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=2273 (Search Engine Watch) and http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/10/2
I'd also like to point out that relevance is a subjective matter, and sometimes the correct answer to a query might not come from the web index at all. Microsoft already emphasizes answers from Encarta when suitable (Google and Yahoo is doing similar things), as seen in this example: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=what+is+chim
I think we'll see more similar stuff from MSN Search in the future. Also, Microsoft seems to be the only one interested in experimenting with the search interface on a major service, as can bee seen on their live.com site -- see http://www.live.com/#q=what%20is%20chimpanzee&off
(Yahoo also has an interesting interface experiment going on an obscure part of an almost forgotten search engine: http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/)
My point is quite simply that what they're doing may be tedious, but this time they're also trying some fresh ideas.
Does anyone really doubt that MS can (and will) scream ahead of Yahoo in market share in the coming years?
Yes. I live down the street from their new office in Santa Monica. They're competing well with Google on recruiting the sharpest people from other regional employers. Including three of my new neighbors who recently moved down here from Seattle.
Google isn't the only one successfully recruiting hot-shit developers from MS.
Regards,
Ross
For me, personally, it's that I can run a particular search query, and if I don't get the exact results I'm looking for, I know how to tweak it so that google will give me the results I need. I could spend 15 minutes on yahoo tweaking search strings to get the exact page/nugget of info, but Google and I are old friends, he knows exactly what I want, if not the first time, than the second. Yahoo or MSN is often times like asking the crazy guy on the corner for directions to the super market. You'll get the general idea, but there's so much gibberish/noise that it's not worth the trouble hardly.
Also: I freaking hate getting ads for credit cards every time I search for anything. I have three, thank you, no I don't want/need any more. When I did need another credit card, I went to Google, and searched for lists of the best credit cards, and applied from one of those sites.
moox. for a new generation.