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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."
Someone should tell Medhi that it also helps when you don't game the search results to fit your corporate agenda.
From time to time, I try out the following query on Bing: "Why is Windows so expensive?"
The day that the first result returned is NOT a site about Macs being expensive is the day I'll start to take Bing seriously. Until then, I'm sticking with Google, which is at least honest enough to properly index anti-Google queries.
So, today? I just tried that search and the Macs article is number 9 on the first set of results. The first article is basically about what you would expect from this search (http://www.timesoftheinternet.com/98741.html) and the second is a story about what you were just describing (http://www.quickpwn.com/2009/08/why-is-windows-so-expensive.html).
Seriously, though, why would you make claims like this without verifying before posting? Oh yeah - Slashdot.
Everything about this post is wrong.
Microsoft gives free search, browser, and email just like google. And google was happy to censor their results in order to do business in China.
This is not a very insightful post IMHO
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
You sound like an absolute moron. Although it is a perfectly human reaction to support the search engine where you rank higher, you need to get a clue. I am a professional SEO, and hundreds of my client sites rank higher in Bing and Yahoo than they do in Google. Search engines are designed for different reasons, and Google is optimized for making money. This means that the advertising on Google gets a lot of click fraud. This still makes money for Google, so what do you expect? The sites above you on Bing might just be there for different reasons.