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."
Same old (Score:5, Insightful)
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Company releases an inferior product, much later to the game than competition, makes excuses for failure, water still wet.
Have you ever used it? In my usage, it performs about as well as Google - in some cases, better. Despite this, I still use Google. Why? Like Windows, Google's market share at this point doesn't have that much to do with its quality, it has more to do with being synonymous with what it is used for. However, unlike Windows, I don't see anything on the horizon that is likely to dethrone it anytime soon.
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Have you ever used it? In my usage, it performs about as well as Google - in some cases, better.
Erm... no
Especially where it should exceed, like, for example, finding MS stuff.
But maybe it's not Bing to blame, but the whole mess of naming and different versions of MS programs (case in point: MSN Messenger / Windows Live Messenger / Whatever it's called tomorrow)
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When I first tried Bing I was impressed. The search results pretty spot on, and there wasn't the extra dross that taints Google's results (mostly because people don't know how to game the system yet). It was like Google was when it first started out. However, once I went from my test searches to real world (and more obscure) ones then it would miss the obvious websites.
It has been an interesting experiment, but when I reinstall my system next week, I will be setting Google as the default again. But I won't
The Data (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:Same old (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I won't touch bing. It generates money for Microsoft, who is willing to give me almost nothing for free. Their free products are tied to using their overly bloated over priced products.
Google has given me a browser, they gave me a superior search engine years ahead of any competition, they offer me a free operating system, AND they host a boatload of code for free stuff for which I've never paid a dime.
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.
And, if all the rest doesn't impress you, Google has decided that they WILL NOT censor the web for 1/4 of the world's population, while Microsoft is quite happy to do so.
If anyone is going to make money off of my searches, it will be Google, unless and until some other company steps up to offer me tons of free stuff, and to "Not be evil".
I guess you could summarize my attitude as "Fuck Microsoft!"
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Well of course Google hasn't charged you anything. That's because you are not their customer. Advertisers are.
You are their product.
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Oh? Really? Lemme see - I select which adverts I see, if any. Google doesn't track me very much at all. Their "tailored" advertising doesn't work on me - I'm as likely to see feminine hygiene products as firearms and survivalist gear. I'm their product? I don't think so. Joe Clueless and Betty Airhead may indeed be Google's products, but I'm not. Have you looked at the Firefox addons? Do you use Privoxy or any other anonymizing software?
As I said, IF anyone is going to make money off of me, it will
Re:Same old (Score:4, Interesting)
But what has MS Research given us compared to some of the things Google has gotten us? Overall, I'm very biased. I never liked Windows. I always thought it was counter-intuitive. Linux, on the other hand, just seems very logical and easy, to me. And Google has therefor given me more than I think some Windows users see.
Nonetheless, now my phone runs Google, too. My browser is now Google--it was Firefox long before that; I think the last time I used IE as my main browser was IE6, for a very short time before I switched over to Linux. My search engine is Google--because Google just has too many things that I haven't even bothered to see if Bing has, which I'm very used to on Google. My e-mail is Google. Many things that I use on a day to day basis have many contributions from Google('s Summer of Code and such).
There's five--the fifth being more than one, really--reasons for me to think Google has done more for me than MS. Most of those are just negatives from MS. I don't hate MS. But I don't like (most of) their work as much as I like Google's work and several others' work, and I don't really like their tactics and style of business. And why would I want to support a company putting all of this money into research and not showing me as much as several others--many of whom do it for free.
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But what has MS Research given us
Tons of advancements in operating systems and computer science, for starters. Whether that is more important than the accomplishments from Google Labs is debatable.
Re:Same old (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of fanboys - maybe you missed the fact that MS OWNS every line of code they produce, and they OWN everything they research.
On the other hand, Google gives away most of the stuff they write research. Google makes it possible to take their neatest stuff, modify it, and release it again.
Granted, there are SOME things that Google won't open source. They have a few bread-and-butter things that they don't want to give away to their competition, which is understandable. But, for the advancement of computer science, almost everything they do is just thrown out there, and made available for anyone who has a "better idea".
Try taking some MS code, and improving on it. IF MS approves of it, they will put their name on it, making it their own, then they will either use it, or drown it in the sea of obscurity surrounding Redmond.
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Try taking some MS code, and improving on it.
Most people who would try, would fail. MS gets their stuff working consistently (99% of the time anyway), then gives you a basic tool, an API, and any libraries and documentation you may need to build your own tool off of their technology.
No, they aren't giving away their code, but they are giving you everything you need to use their code however you wish to use it.
Seriously, when I got into administering MS servers, I was shocked at how much they give away for free. There are literally hundreds of very u
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.
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And for all of that investment, and after fifteen years of trying to make a search engine/web portal that would beat the big guy of the day (Yahoo in the beginning, Google later on), they still lost the game.
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"This is not a very insightful post IMHO"
Just another case of ./ moderation being broken. I wasn't shooting for "insightful", I was just explaining MY attitude. ;^)
"Microsoft gives free search, browser, and email just like google"
I disagree. The search ain't "just like google", hence TFA. The browser ain't "just like google" because Chrome isn't the property of a monopoly trying to squash the only other popular browser in use. Email ain't "just like google" because Outlook is subject to an entire genre
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Freinds don't let freinds do hotmail. I looked at it a time or two. I also looked at yahoo mail. They just don't compare to Gmail, either in features, attractiveness, or the intrusiveness of advertising.
Re:Same old (Score:4, Insightful)
No, IE is just a product you pay for when you buy the Windows bundle. Then you get free updates, like with other paid software.
Except IE won because it came bundled with the OS, in clear abuse of their monopoly, while Google Search "won" for itself.
Re:Same old (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's tied to a paid product (Windows), it ain't free.
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Up until fairly recently IE was also available for Mac, and you don't need to buy a new copy of Windows for every updated version of the browser*. In fact, Microsoft giving away the browser for free was the whole reason why Netscape was so pissed off at them. In any case, I suspect that the only reason IE is no longer available on Macs or other Unix systems is because nobody would voluntarily use it, so they just don't bother maintaining the port any more.
*Except IE9 & XP, but there's going to be an 11
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If you would not be embarrassed about Google releasing the entire contents of your searches over the last two years, I commend you. Also, with IP tracking and the like (which Google does), it is not hard to nail down exactly where you live based on your search information.
Now, they do "anonymize" their records after two years, but someone was recently tracked down using anonymized data from AOL I think it was. Anonymizing is the stripping away of all personal information from the records, so if they can s
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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
results seem skewed towards shopping (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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This is possibly true, but my frustration with Bing (which seems to increase every time I try it) is that most results are blocked by the third-party elements of my fairly extensive hosts file. Now of course, I know I can always disable that, and on occasions I have done so, with results that are usually irrelevant to my query.
This leaves the impression that having painted itself into a corner of
Re:Same old (Score:5, Funny)
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"We messed up" isn't really an excuse.
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It wasn't so much that they messed up, it was grandiose claims of destroying google, ludicrous claims made by Ballmer basically to bump up M$'s share price and to secure his position at M$. They simply were willing to do the hard yards, the long work over years to refine, improve, demonstrate creativity and implement realistic short, medium and long term plans. Just a whole lot of PR=B$ marketing, some behind the scenes questionable manipulations, exaggerated results and some really silly investments.
The
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You're right. It's the new Microsoft company slogan.
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yeah. Example: the summary.
I don't know how plane searches work on Bing but they work super fast on google.
Example: search ORD to JFK and you get a link asking for the dates you wish to fly. After you put those in, if you open each link beneath it (in new tabs) you can search 7 major airline searches for your destination/date in like 5 seconds. (Cheapticket, expedia, hotwire, kayak, orbitz, priceline, travelocity) . So I don't know or even care what bing has on that, since google's is that simple.
Re:Same old (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is always late to the party. GUI, LANs, the internet, and now internet search.
They figure they'll make up for it with superior marketing and product placement within their own software; don't underestimate the power that these things can have.
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It's simpler than that. Bing offers nothing that makes users want to use their search engine instead of Google's. Google is a verb in the English language. When people think of finding something on the web, they think of Google.
Bing doesn't even look like Google when one reaches their landing page; this, accompanied with worries about malware search engines and such, would make people who aren't as in-the-know wonder why that isn't Google. Intelligently, Google protected their landing page to prevent Micros
Well, duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
.
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.
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Again? Though I do think you can make a good argument for the Xboxes.
Re:Well, duh... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, duh... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe I'm being dense but... why? Those seem like very reasonable top searches for a search engine that something like Windows uses by default.
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Turned out it was generated by (if I recall correctly) an MSN application of some kind.
I suppose that's one way to boost your user count :)
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"google" and "yahoo" could easily be generated by people typing in the search box instead of the address bar (I've seen people do it - every time they want to use google they type "google" in the search box then then click the search result to go there).
"internet explorer" I'm not too sure about. I can't imagine anybody typing that.
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Agreed, I think people typing google/yahoo into the searchbar says a lot though, I would be very hesitant to disregard those results.
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And, yes, people certainly do enter "yahoo" as a search query: it turns out that a lot of people depended on the fact that we'd return a whole pages of results from yahoo.com, and they'd use that as an easier way to navigate the site internals.
However, it's a long step from "people do that sometimes" to "5% of all queries are like that."
When we changed the engine so it only gave two results from a single site, we did get complaints from pe
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Is that like head cheese?
Curse you! Now I'm going to be thinking about smegma all afternoon! ARRRRRGGHHH!!!
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Microsoft, doing business by ignoring its own users for the last three decades!
Re:Well, duh... (Score:5, Funny)
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On one hand, MS did good because google is not very good for popular searches. Inevitably many of the front page results will include link farms, some delivering mal ware. OTOH, many people do not use g
It helps to be honest, as well (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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For shits and grins I thought I would try your experiment out.
Not that I was expecting any less from Microsoft, but you weren't fucking kidding. The first result in Bing is the sixth result on Google. I don't expect exact parity between the two, but I would expect results to be somewhat similar. I'm looking for something that's relevant to the topic, therefore I expect similar relevant results between the two. Mac's being expensive isn't relevant, at least not at first.
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Sorry, not buying this. ... Apple.
I am no fan of MS, but typing 'why is windows so expensive' in my search bar on firefox (which defaults to results on Google.com) gives as FIRST hit a newstory about how this query turns up a query about Apple, the second is about
Seriously, did you try it with quotes? (No, didn't try it myself).
Surely, there are more articles on WHY the hardware of APPLE is relatively EXPENSIVE, compared to laptops & pc's which run WINDOWS?
As long as you do not put "" around the query,
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You are essentially trying to claim that when you perform that search, that there is some code that does...
if ( RESULT[0].MakesWindowsLookBad() ) { insert(RESULT, 0, PageThatMakesOSXLookBad) }
This is completely laughable. Really.
A rational person asks the question "Why does it rank that page higher" and "Are any of the solutions preferable to the current ranking system?"
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I do not presume that Google is being dishonest here.
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Which nicely illustrates why Bing is a no-hoper! Most people can tell the difference between good and evil when they see it on a web page. Hint: if the search results are rigged, then its not the product you want! Many of us remember when the answer was Barnes and Noble or Alamo Car Rental regardless of what the question was ....
Find "expletive deleted" at Alamo Car Rentals Yea, that will work!
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To add to the situation, when searching google for "google is evil" the first few hits are about google's "do no evil" while on bing the first page hit (had videos hits at the top) is titled "Is Google evil?" I do not presume that Google is being dishonest here.
That's because there is a lot more precedent for Microsoft being engaged in questionable activities than the same for Google. Sorry, but Microsoft has indeed earned its reputation, and you can't fault people for remembering the past and therefore presuming the worst.
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The few times I've tried bing it has always returned worse results than Google, even when searching for Microsoft stuff. Google isn't without issues though as it is spammed with "linkfarms" or whatever it's called, making Google far less useful today that it was five years ago.
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It would appear that Bing correlates results in real-time, re-scoring based on clicks. So ... when someone searches, "Why Is Windows Expensive," Bing watches to see what the user *clicks* in the results and uses that to score *subsequent* queries. I'm just guessing, of course, but this could explain why some people get that Mac link as the first hit, while others get something else.
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I very much doubt that this is Microsoft fiddling with the search results, just like Google isn't being racist because of the results that come up when you enter "michelle obama monkey".
If the Mac page didn't also come up in the top 10 on Google then I might see that you had a point. Or if the sites asking the question about Windows were censored from the results, then you could complain. But all you have found is a particular search that comes up with a seemingly bizarre result. People used to post that ex [google.com]
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"Why is Windows so expensive?"
HA HA!! I'm just ROFLMAO, thinking about creating a bot that sends that query to BING about 24,000 times a day, from every computer infected. To bad I'm not a black hat, huh? Cool name for it would be the Bing virus. Yeah, I know, a bot ain't a virus, but we could call it that, and use it to scare the ignorant away from Bing! Beauty!
Instincts KNOW (Score:2)
Everybody is jumping on you as though you'd cut yourself in a shark pool because you committed the error of being factually inaccurate in a forum full of geeks. Which doesn't make you right, but still. . .
I think you inadvertently raise an interesting point.
You just assume that MS is being sneaky. And you have EVERY reason to believe this to be the case. Can you imagine a world where search is ruled by the MS totalitarian approach to everything they touch? I have a very hard time trusting Google, and th
Remember the old days? (Score:2)
In the 90's you could type "Linux" into a Microsoft search engine and get half a dozen hits when Infoseek (this was before google...) gave a million-odd.
That was when Microsoft lost me as a customer for their search engines - past, present, future. I really haven't bothered to try Bing and never will.
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I'm not calling you a liar and in fact I believe you. The fact a question about Macs being expensive on the first page shows that Bing is faulty but the fact it's results vary so much from person to person for the same query is just down right awful.
My query: why is windows so expensive
My top results:
# Why are Mac's So Expensive? - Yahoo! Answers Best Answer: Charging a higher price for computers is necessary in order for Apple to have a large research and development budget, as well as allowing th
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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.
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Second answer:
Bing still sucks, but at least it's funny while it sucks.
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I just ran the search through bing, and as GP suggests, the very first hit is http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061212021150AAOfyNz [yahoo.com]
GP's assertion is verified by me, anyway. Maybe it makes a difference which browser you use for the search, or which operating system, or maybe even what country you are searching from?
I'm running Firefox on Ubuntu Karmic, from the United States. Maybe they force feed that specific search result to the people they think are most likely to buy a Mac? Who knows? Le
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Well, here's a screenshot [imgur.com]. I guess it's possible that it's different because I'm Canadian, though it does imply it's not limiting results based on that.
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He MIGHT BE a moron - but people are reporting different results, with screenshots to back them up.
He MIGHT BE a Microsoft shill - but when people get different results for the same search, you have to scratch your head.
You've contributed nothing here. Next time, post with your real name, so you can be properly modded "troll".
And, no, I'm OBVIOUSLY NOT a Microsoft shill - search for my other posts on this page, dummy.
Lost? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Sure (Score:5, Funny)
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.
So they say (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
MapReduce Thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html [joelonsoftware.com]
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?
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For now. And that will only last until the founders leave or step back in the oversight and are replaced by Standford MBA's. Then it will become about the bottom line. Look at what happened to Motorola when the family was forced out about a decade or more ago...
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They need to do something more radically different (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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 ;-)
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http://www.ixquick.com/ [ixquick.com] -- there ya go.
You can even google it ;-)
But.. then google would know that you're googling for a non-google google! *head explodes*
Re:They need to do something more radically differ (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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.
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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.
Microsoft doesn't have a problem with google abusing privacy. Their only complaint is that they want to be the ones doing it, not google! Ask me how I feel in a year or two but for now I still trust Microsoft a whole lot less than Google.
Re:They need to do something more radically differ (Score:3, Insightful)
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 resoundi
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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.
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That's not true in my experience. I have switched from Google to Scroogle (.org) which doesn't track me. I lose the geolocation (hits from my own country first), but everything else is fine.
So (Score:2)
They can't except that Google is just better at search. Period. Why can't they just accept that and stop stalking
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``They can't except that Google is just better at search. Period. Why can't they just accept that and stop stalking the search market?''
It's all about control. For many people, their default search engine is basically their gateway to the World Wide Web, perhaps even the entire Internet. If you control that search engine, this gives you a huge amount of control.
There are many ways to monetize this control. Other people in this discussion have suggested altering the results of queries to favor your (profitab
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
Why was it necessary to want to "crush" Google? (Score:2)
Oh, so since they screwed up, they're not going to be able to completely destroy Google, so they'll settle for even competition? It's this kind of thinking that's gotten Microsoft into trouble in the past, the philosophy that they can be the only one, so they have to destroy anything that remotely competes with them.
Why I switched to Bing (Score:3, Insightful)
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.)
Re: (Score:2)
So, what will you do if and when Bing starts showing results from Twitter/Facebook/LiveJournal? Refuse to use any search engines at all?
Choices are choices. If you don't want results from Twitter, then avert your eyes from that part of the screen.
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: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: (Score:3, Funny)
I should have spent my keystrokes showing my contempt for others, I suppose that belongs at slashdot more than my anecdote.
FINALLY, someone gets it!
Oh wait, was that sarcasm? ;)
Just Another failed attempt at search by MS (Score:2)
It is like everyone around here is too young to remember the last what 3-6 failures MS made at "new" search engine or too old and their memory does not work anymore.
There is no reason to waist time and effort on bing as webmaster, until bing (or whatever they want to relabel it) starts moving traffic I don't care about bing as a search engine.
Re: (Score:2)
Bing lost me for another reason (Score:2)
Too much eye candy and/or AJAX nonsense. This is especially true for image search. My laptop chokes trying to render it sometimes. I shouldn't have to buy the lates, greatest, desktop replacement laptop just do do an image search. Also, it seems to want to popup or something when you click an image. Maybe there's a fix for that which doesn't involve dumbing down my IE security settings. I have to admit I never tried it on Chrome, I just gave up on it and went back to Google.
Because of their non-simple
"When developing search engine technology" (Score:2)
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.
Ignore less common queries? (Score:2)
Surely ignoring the least common queries is the most stupid thing to do... For the most common things, most people generally know where to go anyway... Search engines are for when you're actually looking for something.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)