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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."
Company releases an inferior product, much later to the game than competition, makes excuses for failure, water still wet.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
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Search engines are all about people looking to find stuff. A good portion of what people look for are probably new things that are happening now.
So, Microsoft goes off and designs a brand new "bet the ranch" search engine, without even knowing how its customers use such a service. Yes, that sounds like Microsoft.
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.
Nope, I'm sorry but you didn't get the frist post. On the other hand you did get the first post! Congratulations!
Now be a good boy and go back to the main page to wait for the next article so you can try and be the first one to post something again.
As long as there are search engines and choices, the war isn't over. A war of unskilled attrition, ( like Microsoft plays ) can take a long time to end.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's not the 20 relevant ones that's the trouble, it's the thousands of irrelevant ones.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Microsoft is so far behind now that they won't crush Google, but they hope to live side by side...
The same way the Zune lives side by side with the iPod.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I would say they lost by:
1. Being too late. Search engines have been around for many years. You can't easily launch a search engine now without a massively improved user experience over what is already available.
2. Not being trusted, I don't want to use Microsoft's search engine as it may subvert the results to promote their wares.
3. Stupid name. Every time I hear "Bing" I think of Ned Ryserson from the film Groundhog Day.
4. OTT interface, I don't need a big background when I'm looking for stuff.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html
Perhaps Microsoft just cannot think like that? To be clear, Microsoft saying that maybe Google and Bing can perhaps exist side-by-side is a clear admission of defeat. Microsoft never says that, so you know the situation is bad. I just can't understand why they got a bee in their bonnet and wanted to chase Google in the way that they have. It was clearly a knee-jerk thing and they hadn't clearly thought about it. The only major difference they did was change the name from the stale MSN Search name to something they thought was cooler - Bing. Nothing else changed.
To not take into account that people search for many random and obscure things put together that won't have been recorded before (language is a very broad thing and what people search for is also time-based i.e. NOW), and not to have some sort of logic to aid with that, is utterly unforgiveable. What the hell are Microsoft Research doing?
I don't think Bing will ever out-Google Google. So it's strange that they don't try to identify problems with Google and address them. They seem to start out with the assumption that Google is perfect, so the best path forward is to do everything just like Google, only more so.
The big problem with Google is privacy. Why not try to make a search engine that doesn't track what you do? I'd pay a subscription for such a thing. Maybe most people wouldn't, but I would. Search is such a big market that 5% of it is still huge. Maybe 5% of the people in the US would pay for private searching.
MS has had a kind of bullying culture for a long time, and they've declared war on open source, so we've viewed them as the bad guys for a long time. But windows is a heck of a lot more open than the iPad, and their business model isn't based on data mining. In a lot of ways, they've been left behind by many of the most toxic trends in the industry. They should listen to some of the things that we linux folks have been saying, and try to fit them into their pitch when they can. Talk about the value of controlling your own data, of privacy, of letting anyone who wants to write a program and distribute it, of being able to install your software on whatever hardware you want. That's not snake oil -- it's good stuff.
The strange thing is that they've missed those toxic trends not because they value the good alternatives, but because they're big and sluggish and not very agile. They've just been left behind. And all they want is to catch up so they can turn the same screws on us that Apple and Google turn. It doesn't occur to them to make the kinds of arguments I'm proposing here.
I'd pay a subscription for such a thing.
http://www.ixquick.com/ -- there ya go.
You can even google it ;-)
Bing can't perform as well as Google because for one, it doesn't have the same data to begin with.
For example, have you ever released a new website and watched how long it takes for Bing to index it compared to Google?
Why not try to make a search engine that doesn't track what you do? I'd pay a subscription for such a thing.
How would they keep track of who has subscribed if they're not tracking people?
The day I searched (a few months ago) for information on the Toyota recall and got an automatically scrolling box of Twitter posts was the day I switched to Bing.
(That said, Bing really isn't as good as Google... but most of the time it's almost as good, and I really don't want anything to automatically scroll, and I really really don't want any results from Twitter.)
You're comparing oranges to apples, so to speak. An operating system is not equivalent to a single product put out by a company.
Tell me, is the Xbox more open than the iPad? Because those two products are the ones you should be comparing. Closed, tightly regulated ecosystems in both cases, although I'd still give the iPad the edge for ease of developer access.
On the other hand, is Windows more open than OS X? Clearly, the answer to that is a resounding NO, as you quickly realize as you jump through Microsoft's "Genuine Advantage" license code hoops.
I have my own website which is absolutely authoritative on its rather narrow topic. This website is easily findable by its unique keyword that identifies the topic (similar to searching for "slashdot", you won't find any cooking websites or shopping, only tech stuff). I'm at #5 on Google and my number one competitor is at #6. Neither of us shows up on a Bing.com search, I quit looking after page 10 of results. The results just have a bunch of websites that I've never heard of before. Even more galling, Bing.com tries to play games with my results because I'm overseas. I search for "mykeyword" and select "Only English". Bing.com helpfully comes back with "Results are included for XXX XXX (foreign word that is the translation of my keyword)". Two of the sites on the first page say "Parse error: syntax error" as their preview. Yes, my site is in Bing's index and regularly submits XML sitemaps.
In conclusion, Bing sucks if it can't put my site in the first 10 search results. Hell, it should at least be in the top 100. I don't game Google, either, other than some basic SEO that any responsible business owner should do.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
There's a difference between keeping track of who has subscribed and keeping track of what subscribers search for. Of course, in this scenario, subscribers would have to blindly trust Microsoft.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Performance is comparable to Google, but I get the impression that Bing's results are more skewed for people looking to purchase things on line. Try some basic 'how to' queries (how to caulk a window, how to make pancakes, etc) and see if you get more product related hits returned near the top with Bing than with Google.
This isn't a criticism, just an observation. It could be a smart thing for MS. It will help them squeeze more advertising dollars out of smaller market share.
It seems to me that Bing may be a better tool for shopping than Google is, but Google is a better tool for searching than Bing is.
Bing's problem then becomes that there are several better tools for shopping and comparing prices than Bing offers.
Why not try to make a search engine that doesn't track what you do? I'd pay a subscription for such a thing.
No you wouldn't. Seriously, let's be real - you absolutely would not pay for a subscription to a search engine.
And neither would anyone else. Nobody.
There are simply too many free alternatives out there (Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc., etc., etc.) - only a complete and utter twit who was absolutely new to the internet would pay for a subscription to a search engine.
If you're going to suggest a business model, at least suggest one that has some vague, remote possibility of being successful.
Google makes it money with ads. Search is one of their means to display said ads. Kill their search, kill their ads, kill their income, kill them putting more and more of productivity on the web, stop them killing MS products.
MS is not directly intrested in seach, but they are intrested in keeping control over where applications run. The more they can control that, the more they can keep selling their products.
Take gmail. Nobody who wants to be taken serious uses hotmail anymore, but that is not the point. With gmail for businesses, how many companies have lifted themselves OUT of the need for exchange? And with that windows on the server AND with that windows on the client for Outlook?
Gee, all of the sudden you can use a Mac or Linux machine without paying MS a dime. It is being used more and more, and it is not just that lost revenue that MS fears. The more people do NOT uses the latest word/outlook to generate their office documents, the more you as a MS shop cannot do it, because nobody can read your documents.
And that could be the beginning of the end for MS. Not because nobody uses Word anymore to create doc files, but because they use the old version they have, with the format everyone can read.
The biggest enemy of MS is NOT people to stop using their product, but not buying the latest version.
Software after all does not run out. If XP works, you can use it for years to come. Decades even.
Googles Search is not the enemy, it is the income Google has that allows it to launch other products.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Remember Cuil? They were originally talking about the "long tail"; they wanted to have a bigger index than Google. Cuil is mostly ex-Google people, and they thought they could re-do Google at lower cost.
Didn't help Cuil.
There's ongoing effort in search engine development. Unless you pay close attention, though, it's invisible. A few years ago, around 2007, Yahoo introduced about fifty specialized search sub-engines. These understood weather, stocks, sports, celebrities, movies, and similar popular search topics. They focused on areas that have a strong structure, and need a lookup engine that understands that structure. For about six months, Yahoo was way ahead of Google on such searches.
Didn't help Yahoo. Google implemented something similar and caught up. Now everybody does that.
It's not clear that the Twitter search is a win. Bing announced they were going to do Twitter and Facebook searches, and a day later, Google announced they'd do that too. Google implemented Twitter search, and apparently Bing didn't. Twitter search just seems to clutter up Google results.
In the last year, Google has become much more aggressive about interpreting queries. Google tries hard to infer from the query words what the user is really looking for. This tends to work for popular queries (since it's based on statistics from other queries) and doesn't work too well for unusual queries. For hard queries, you need to use explicit operators ('+' and '"') with Google more than you did a year ago.
The big search engines are still doing badly at de-rating sites which are basically link farms. When you're searching for a product, and you get a hit that's just some site with ad links to other sites, that's a fail. Search for auto parts, and you're likely to get "parts.com", "thepartsbin.com" and "who-sells-it.com", which are just "portals". They don't even return pages that are actually about the part in question. ("thepartsbin.com" pages are all essentially the same, except for keywords inserted for SEO purposes.) Search engines need to look at the business behind the web site. If a business has a million commercial-looking web pages, and a total business volume of a few million dollars, they're probably bogus. That's a part of the "long tail" you don't need to visit.