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Microsoft To Change Desktop Search After Google Complaint
Raver32 writes to tell us that Microsoft will be making changes to their desktop search tool in Vista after a 49-page antitrust complaint was filed by Google. "Microsoft initially dismissed the allegations, saying regulators had reviewed the program before Vista launched. However, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in an interview last week that the company was willing to make changes if necessary."
They're putting in a link for other search providers! Boy, aren't we glad that MS obeys the spirit of the law, and not just the word.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
( "what? We did it because we were told to! Not our fault your desktop is all broke now!" )
Okay, so prolly not like that. But seriously; they could've avoided the bad PR by just responding to a quiet request in the first place, instead of being pushed into it... as usual.
I realize there's prolly some sort of 'we only do it when we have to' mentality prevalent in Redmond, but when is someone there going to realize that maybe, you know, they can take a chance and do The Right Thing - when the asking is being done quietly and politely, and not finally and grudgingly do it later when there's a big fat lawsuit or four hanging over their heads?
I know, I know... but I still have some small bit of dreamer left in me.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Also I am reminded of the fights between AOL and MSFT about allowing the PC makers to install additional icons in the desktop touting services that competed with MSN etc back in the Win95/98 time frame. AOL won, but it became irrelevant eventually. Will the scenario repeat? Has google jumped the shark?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That just raises further questions!
1. WHY such an odd (pardon the pun) number of pages?
2. What does it matter? Does anyone think that more pages = better? Did MS' lawyers see the brief and go "Shit guys, it's over 47 pages long. We better settle!"?
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Either Google wants to control our OS or media search engines have turned into whiny conglomerates that fight over whose right it is to search what. I am more concerned about Google throttling competition than MS.
Contrary to the title of the article...
Microsoft To Change Desktop Search After Google Complaint...MS hasnt agreed to do anything...
However, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in an interview last week that the company was willing to make changes if necessary.(Micorsoft,) Please define "if necessary"... is it:
Until such a definition is announced by MS, this statement doesnt mean much of anything - except perhaps as an attempt to make the general public think they are addressing the issue of choice on the public's behalf (as most of the general public will probably read into their statement in the same way that happened when the article title was created).
Just my thoughts on the matter...
-Robert
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
From TFA:
The bit most interesting to me was this. Does this mean that Microsoft have done again what they were penalised for in 2000? Two of the restrictions placed upon it then were:
So, I imagine they're back to using the secret API for the Microsoft search, while slowing down the 'official' APIs third parties must use. Although the press item only has one sentence on it, this 'optimisation' issue is as important as Microsoft providing a competing product to Google Desktop Search in my opinion.
I assume the technical information handed over to Google will be details of how to access key parts of Microsoft's hidden-hook goodies?
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
The issue with your post is the statement:
The issue here is that Microsoft does not include a way to turn off its own desktop search
It does. It includes *several* ways to do so. Disable the service, use net stop, use the API.
Man, ya'll must be sheep. Seriously.
Look. MS wrote the OS. MS owns the OS. MS can do whatever they want with it. If that means integrate whatever the **** they want, then piss off. If you don't like it, don't use it. It is not drinking water. Yes, you can live with MS. I don't use Windows, but I will do whatever it takes to make sure MS does not loose this fundamental freedom.
I find it quite unbelievable some people's feelings of entitlement. No, you are not entitled that somebody provide an OS that does what you want how you want it.
Your job depends on using Windows? Quit. It's not that hard. You are not under threat of violence. There are other jobs out there. Start your own business. Mow a lawn, I don't care. You are free people in a free society. Just choose not to participate in what you disagree with. What are you, sheep?
No, mostly you're just arm chair pundents. Debating the evilness of some entity but not getting up long enough to do something about it.
"Desktop Search" is what you turn off to gain HDD access speed, because you actively organize your personal files (unlike other schmucks).
It creates so much IO load that so far every machine I used it on got down to a crawl once it indexed a couple 100,000 files. I guess that's why they turn it off automatically once any user interaction is noticed. But by then it has consumed so much virtual memory that every other app has to be paged back in slowly. That gets better with 2 GB of memory but not much. Oh well, I guess I need 64bit and 4GB.
It helps to put the index on a different disk than your OS and your page file, but not a lot.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Well, no, not exactly.
Though I just love locate, this is a wee bit different. For one, these programs index the content of your documents as well, not just their names. As practical as locate is, it only matches your search to the list of names in the database; I cannot search for a document containing some word.
Of course, that's where grep comes in, but then, grep's database is the fscking filesystem, so it may take a while.
Besides, I can teach my father how to use Beagle. I cannot teach him how to grep.
OK, I could, but I don't have the time.
Ignore this signature. By order.
"OSX supported hardware" is not a market, it's a product. You can legally have a monopoly on a product (patent, copyright, trademark), but you can not (unless otherwise specified) have and use a monopoly on a market (Desktop computing) to give you an unfair advantage in another market (Internet Search).
Here Microsoft is using their Desktop monopoly to boost their online search business and (this is the illegal part) restricting their monopoly product from using someone else's online search business.
http://www.mhall119.com
Disabling the service does not disable it for all of Vista. If you read the original complaint, that was a major issue -- some actions would still call the MS Search instead of whatever other search tool the user wanted.
Use the API? Are you certain that the API provided by MS to third-party developers is the same as the one used my MS's search? As other posters have pointed out, this has been a problem in the past with MS.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Cheering for either company is ridiculous. So Bill Gates has a few more billions than Sergei and Larry, but so what. It's not like any of us have our own private 737 to fly around in.
I like an OS to come with more stuff out of the box with every release. It's just less complicated to put in one CD and get everything - that's why I like Linux and OS/X. People have a right to make their products, however they want them. It sucks to bolt rear views on a car after the fact, and it sucks to go and download a bunch of unintegrated utilities onto your drive.
Google could have been proactive and released a Vista Upgrade for their search, with an Aero look, that shuts of Microsoft search. They could go and see every OS out there, and for Vista owners, drop down a new FireFox and a new Google Search FOR VISTA. But instead of being agressive, they cry to lawyers just like Netscape did. The result will be the same.
Microsoft delivered a new search experience with their new OS, and it is time for Google to respond with product.
I'm waiting for a new Google Search for Vista.
This is my sig.
I am not that up on linux, but as posts below indicate, locate only finds filenames, not file contents.
I suppose it is a step up form find, since it appears to maintain an index file.
But find is not a service constantly running as a service as I suppose locate would be. And DOS and windows also (have) come with a close equivalent of find, though not as flexible. The dir command works wonders in that respect.
No the desktop search is something completely different. It is not just a command line utiltiy. I do believe some kind of desktop utility like Vistas desktop search, Beagle, Spotlight or Google desktop search is a nice thing to have if you want it - but that is not the qeustion.
The question is can Vista desktop search be easily turned off? That is not so clear despite people claiming here that it can be stopped by disabling the service. I am sure that if we can think of ways to do so, so could the minds at Google. There may be something more to this than meets the eye, and I wouldn't think it is something simplistic. If it was simplistic I am sure Google could handle it.
Who the hell modded this "insightful?" First, Apple is not a monopoly, so they cannot illegally leverage that monopoly via bundling, hence there is no legal action that makes sense. Second, Google was not even complaining about the bundling (although they have every right to). They complained about two things:
Apple fits into neither of those categories. Google has an indexed search on OS X and it uses the same API and hooks as Spotlight, resulting in no slowdowns for Google's tool and no disadvantage given to them.
Are those enough reasons? If not, please RTFA before posting again.
Does anybody actually read these, or just start bashing? Microsoft does not *prevent* anyone from adding a different desktop search. They have not "added locks to the fridge" so that you can't add Pepsi. They've just made it so that you have to bring in your own Pepsi and stock it yourself. If you're too lazy to do that, that's your problem. You have that choice. If you went into a Chevy dealership and bought a Corvette and then told them that you wanted a Ferrari engine instead of the Chevy engine, do you think they'd change it for you? Did you see an option for the Ferrari engine on the sticker? Doubt it. You can replace it, but you'll have to get off your lazy ass and replace it yourself. Don't want to go through the hassle? Then buy something else.
So they arent allowed to add valuable features to their OS any more? Maybe they should just go back to selling DOS to make sure there arent *any* of the last 20 years innovations in it.
I call shenanigans on your claim anyway. I believe indexed search was introduced into Windows with Win2k. Google's version may have been superior, but its not like they invented searching for stuff.
Well, that's not ALL we're talking about. Remember, this was an MS-made replacement for Google's desktop search and Microsoft only made it AFTER seeing Google's product, at which point they merged it into Windows at a fairly deep level.
Rubbish. Microsoft first said Vista (Longhorn at the time) would have "Desktop Search" a year before before Google's first GD beta (and two years before Apple released Spotlight). Further, they'd been talking about the broad concept since at least the mid 90s.
In other words, I don't really care what they put into their OS, but WHY they put it in there: to kill off competitors (Google) and their products.
The idea that it was a "response" to Google's product (and hence some deliberate, targeted attack), doesn't even pass the laugh test.
As practical as locate is, it only matches your search to the list of names in the database; I cannot search for a document containing some word. ... I can teach my father how to use Beagle. I cannot teach him how to grep.
There are dozens of GUI front ends to grep that deliver most of the functionality. One of the easiest to use is the KDE find utility, which can search by content, file dates and all of that. Used in conjunction with a reasonable directory structure, you can get most of the benefits of an indexing search engine witout the performance hit. Real data mining this way is tedious, however, so I'd expect there are already free tools that someone has or will make a KDE interface for.
At the end of the day the real question is if you trust Google or M$ to mine your files for you. M$ will sell you for a nickel and Google can be forced by governments. This is why free software is the answer where you are doing anything you care about.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Who the hell modded this "insightful?" First, Apple is not a monopoly, so they cannot illegally leverage that monopoly via bundling, hence there is no legal action that makes sense.
Ok who the hell modded this "informative"... Of course, you do realize that Apple has a complete monopoly on software, bundling AND hardware in its own niche, never mind of the law is shortsighted enough to miss that.
Apple users use anything Steve feeds them and Apple's solution is far more locked down than Windows ever was.
Apple fits into neither of those categories. Google has an indexed search on OS X and it uses the same API and hooks as Spotlight, resulting in no slowdowns for Google's tool and no disadvantage given to them.
Apple works tightly with Google, so that's given. I want to know: how I set Live.com as the search engine in Safari?