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Microsoft and Yahoo Reach Deal
e9th writes "We know that Microsoft failed last February in its attempt to buy Yahoo. Now, Advertising Age reports that they've reached a deal. Instead of a buyout, the two will enter into a revenue sharing agreement, and Bing will become Yahoo's default search engine. The meat of the AdAge article can be found in Yahoo News. This deal may give Google something to worry about."
I recall Fake Steve Jobs had some rather insightful thoughts on this.
The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster.
It's interesting how people side with Google on this site, even though they're guilty of many of the things people complain about Microsoft doing, such as putting out lots of side products that have little to moderate success, attempting to tie branded products together to create one giant platform, and collecting data on users. Merely suggesting a competitor could actually make Google worry about something is even labeled rabble rousing.
Agree on this. Yahoo is much better than Google for Japanese language search (and Google translate is a sad joke for Japanese; even when I take the time to read through the Japanese original I can often still not make sense of the English "translation"). There's going to be a lot of unhappy people here if they manage to bork that up.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
> Conspiracy to hide the information or suckage?
The latter, probably caused by the well-known fact that Microsoft is strongly focused on non-technical users. Obviously technical information about search-engine indexing practices isn't the sort of thing most end users would search for, so Microsoft doesn't care whether it works well or not.
If they wanted to *hide* the information, they'd try to keep it out of the search engines that people who *would* look for such information are most likely to use, chiefly Google. In the absence of any evidence that they've attempted that, I would tend to discount the notion that the poor results in Bing are a deliberate obfuscation, in favor of the more likely explanation that they just don't care whether it's any good at turning up technical information.
If you search on Bing for DateTime module, the docs for the Perl and Python DateTime modules do show up, but at #4 and #2, respectively. The same search on Google, predictably, turns them up at #2 and #1. Of course, anyone who actually uses Perl would go straight to search.cpan.org (personally, I have a bookmark keyword for it), and I suspect the Python community has something similar (at least, I would hope so). Nonetheless, Bing's relevancy ranking isn't putting the canonical information first, and Google's is.
I tried searching for Encyclopedia, and the top four results are encyclopedia.com (never heard of it, but it does appear to be relevant, albeit not great; I looked up mitosis in it and got eight paragraphs from Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, which is a pretty meager article for such a major topic, but it would be enough for most gradeschool reports), the Wikipedia article on Encyclopedia, the Britannica main page, and the English Wikipedia main page, in that order. So again, the two that obviously ought to be in the top four results are there. Actually, I tried the same thing on Google, and its ranking is just about the same (with, again, encyclopedia.com in the top slot; I have no idea why, unless having the search term in the domain name is a major boost).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.