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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
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.
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.
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 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