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Microsoft Lost Search War By Ignoring the Long Tail
Art3x writes "When developing search engine technology, Microsoft focused on returning good results for popular queries but ignored the minor ones. 'It turned out the long tail was much more important,' said Bing's Yusuf Mehdi. 'One-third of queries that show up on Bing, it's the first time we've ever seen that query.' Yet the long tail is what makes most of Google's money. Microsoft is so far behind now that they won't crush Google, but they hope to live side by side, with Bing specializing in transactions like plane tickets, said Bing Director Stefan Weitz."
I worked on MSN Search (later "Live Search") so I can answer a few of these for you: 1) There was very little collaboration with the MSN teams. MSN is generally despised at Microsoft, and to get people to come to Search we had to reassure them that it wasn't "really" part of MSN. For their part, the MSN people seemed to try really hard to live up to their "it can't be done" reputation. For example, the MSN team controlled the UI, and even though a top customer complaint was that there wasn't enough space for users to type their queries, no force in the Universe was powerful enough to make the MSN guys widen it. (Their design rules required it be usable by people whose display was a TV set.) 2) Yeah, the MSN data was worthless. First, there wasn't that much of it; rather than saving the raw data, they had a process for computing digests of it, and that's all we could get. Also, that digest process was full of bugs. For example, for years it told us the top queries were "google," "internet explorer" and "yahoo"; it was obvious this was a bug, but our management couldn't get the MSN team to do anything about it. 3) As Yusuf suggests in his article, the cumuative Search and Click data is NOT what you need to produce a good search engine. One of the most frustrating things about working on Search at Microsoft was Management's obsession with head queries. They had several articles of faith that didn't accord with reality, but this was one of the worst. Good news for Microsoft if they've finally figured this out. Of course, almost all the people responsible for the original mess are long gone now. 4) The Google-worship was nauseating. We wasted all kinds of effort trying to duplicate features that obviously didn't work even for Google (news being an obvious example) whereas new features that might have been helpful consistently got killed with "Google doesn't do that." In many cases, this argument was used for technologies where no one had any reasonable clue what Google actually did. --Greg
Google has decided that they WILL NOT censor the web for 1/4 of the world's population,
Well, to be precise, Google went along with the censorship until they caught the Red Dynasty fucking with their servers, and decided that they'd had enough.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."