Microsoft Lost Search War By Ignoring the Long Tail 267
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."
Re:It helps to be honest, as well (Score:3, Informative)
I just performed that search, and GP is correct: first result is indeed 'Why are Mac's So Expensive? - Yahoo! Answers'. This result is duplicated when searching with the phrase surrounded by quotes, and without.
Privacy enhanced search? (Score:2, Informative)
I'd pay a subscription for such a thing.
http://www.ixquick.com/ [ixquick.com] -- there ya go.
You can even google it ;-)
Re:Same old (Score:2, Informative)
My name is almost specific and 99% of the searches actually about me. google provides 5000 entries while Bing shows only 150 items.
I was hoping that Bing can provide an alternative to Google and gave it more than a few trials. However it disappointed me. I could not even find my own conference papers and articles on Bing. On Google, the first entry points to my homepage while Bing used to show a very old mailing list email of mine (which strangely belongs to 1998 !!!)
Another example is my favorite website. Google has indexed 5 million pages on that site while Bing has only indexed 10,000 pages!!. Obviously the index size of Google is much much bigger.
How I am supposed to use Bing when I am sure it does not list 90-95% of the search results 9in comparison to Google).
Re:Same old (Score:0, Informative)
More, Google promotes the advancement of computer science, without trying to take possession of every line of code written to work with their offerings. None of that "embrace, extend, extinguish" nonsense.
What the fuck are you talking about? Google invests nowhere NEAR what Microsoft invests in MS Research. Shareholders are annoyed with MS invests too much in research. No other company does that.
Though to be fair, for fanboys like you, facts are rarely a problem when making up your opinion.
Bing sucks (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Well, duh... (Score:5, Informative)
history of Microsoft and Search (Score:1, Informative)
"Search isn't some relatively new effort that dates back to 2003 at Microsoft. Search, especially web search, is something the company has seriously pursued since 1997 [searchengineland.com]. In its first era, Microsoft started out with a crawler-based search engine, one that creates listings by using automation to harvest material from across the web. It then migrated to building a very good service that relied primarily on human power, human beings to either catalog the web or customize top search results with hand-picked answers. Bill Bliss was the person in charge during most of this period. Here's how it unfolded, over the years"
"I was always told "Search is not core to our business [searchengineland.com], Google is not a competitor, Yahoo is not the competition, AOL is the competitor to beat, subscription services is how we're going to win.", Bill Bliss, Former Microsoft Search Chief
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
That is simple, starvation (Score:3, Informative)
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.
No, it's not the "long tail" (Score:5, Informative)
Remember Cuil [cuil.com]? 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.
Re:Bing sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Novice != moron, but go ahead and say that if that's what makes you feel good. To return the favor, I couldn't care less about your professional SEO bullshit. Frankly, I steer clear of fraudsters like you.
I'm telling you that my site is absolutely the #1 most informative site about my keyword on the internet, and if you're searching for my rather obscure keyword you'd be very glad indeed to find that there is a comprehensive resource on the subject. I'm not "supporting" one search site over the other, I'm saying one site returns relevant results and the other not only fails, but fails hard. The #3 result is a site that I've never heard of, that hasn't been updated since 2006. #1 is good if boring, but the rest on the front page are not terribly relevant.
But hey, I must be totally wrong to survey the situation from my viewpoint and report empirically on slashdot. I must be an "absolute moron" because I'm not an "SEO professional". You're right, I should have spent my keystrokes showing my contempt for others, I suppose that belongs at slashdot more than my anecdote.
Re:Well, duh... (Score:3, Informative)
Is that like head cheese?
Curse you! Now I'm going to be thinking about smegma all afternoon! ARRRRRGGHHH!!!
Re:Same old (Score:5, Informative)
An interested person might start here: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
This is interesting reading: http://socghop.appspot.com/ [appspot.com]
Chrome and/or Chromium browser: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome [wikipedia.org]
Whatever your interest is in open source, try googling it. Not everything in the labs is open source, but some is - check that out: http://www.googlelabs.com/ [googlelabs.com]
Want code to play with? You'll get more from Google than you'll EVER get from Microsoft. Maybe I exxagerated with the word "most" - but they have given away a lot of stuff, and they help with a lot more. One of the things you'll see when you click the links above is Gnome. They contribute, but, of course, Gnome doesn't belong to Google - that capital "g" is just coincidental.
So, go look around.