Microsoft Introduces Competition For Google News

Romeo E. Cabrera writes "In advance of an imminent launch of its own search engine, Microsoft has launched its own version of the popular Google News service. Based initially on feeds from the Moreover news aggregation service, the new beta service (known as MSN Newsbot) aims to provide news on a range of subjects including World, Sports, Entertainment, Science and Technology."

Oddly Enough...

[Jaysyn]

.. I doubt many here care. Just annother "innovation" from MicroSoft.

Jaysyn

Re:Paranoid? Maybe not..

[ironfrost]

It looks like you might have a point - at the moment, the second and third highest ranked articles are about Microsoft themselves.

I compared

[savaget]

I did a comparison of both by searching my hometown(in Canada).
The MS got 8 hits while Google got 21. The main difference here seems that Google hits were sourced from newspaper web pages and MS hits came mostly from newswire services.

Litmus test

[cyranoVR]

"Linux Windows" [msn.com] on newsbot.msn.com = 717 stories
First headlines:
Sun Micro Signs China Desktop Linux Software Deal (Reuters)
Leader: Comdex reflects harsh IT realities (Silicon.com)
Brown defends Blair relationship (?? Guardian Unlimited)

"Linux Windows" [google.com] on news.google.com = ~1,800 stories
First headlines:
Intel intros hyperthreading compilers for Linux, Windows (The Inquirer, UK)
Linux-Windows file access (Linuxworld)
An editor to ease Windows to Linux migration (Newsforge)

Re:As long as it is not the same stuff

[h4rm0ny]

This is a little off-topic I admit, but I'll risk the Karma because it might be of interest to a few people here seeing as a lot of /.'s have such strong political views.

I subscribe to Stratfor [stratfor.com]. It's a paid for service geared towards investors and company strategists and it provides some of the best international and political news you'll ever find. It's cheap enough that I subscribe privately and you can guarentee that it isn't full of propaganda. Why? Because it's used by people with money and whatever news corps tell the masses, the stock market has the right connections to know what's really going down.

Now please don't hammer my karma for trying to be helpful.

Re:Paranoid? Maybe not..

[mcpkaaos]

much like Linux search results in MSN's search

Didn't we just dispel that myth about a week ago, when showing that beyond MSN's initial page(s) of sponsored links, Linux search results thrived in massive numbers? A search for "linux" on MSN returns 440 sponsored links, most of which are legitimate linux sites. Going beyond that list yields over 15 million additional results. I know that doesn't compare to Google, but that's like apples to oranges. Google is a far superior search engine/service by its own merit. Linux.org is #4 on the first page of results, by the way (even though it is beneath that site about migrating away from linux over to Microsoft, lol).

I know that we can't expect Microsoft to roll out the red carpet for negative news about themselves too often, or even positive news for alternative products, but can we please stop with the paranoia? I think they've demonstrated that while they are in fact petty, they aren't quite that petty.

Re:What about MSNBC???

[nsebban]

All of MSNBC's content is produces by NBC's journalists...MS only provides technical part.

Gooogle has News Alerts

[descil]

I don't know if google is ready to show this to the world yet, but it's in their labs, and most of you should already know about it anyway.

When MS comes out with a full version of this [google.com], I'll consider going to their site. Until then, I'll just read my email for news...

Google is teh r0x0r.

Re:Paranoid? Maybe not..

[marauder404]

Did you even try running a search? Their site tends to return Sponsored Sites, Featured Sites, and then whole sites dedicated to your query. Only then are individual pages listed. The difference is sites vs. pages. The second page of results are not second-tier, but just individual pages. The intent is obvious: ads to pay for the site, then whole websites dedicated to your query, and then individual pages. For very generic queries like Linux, it's probably better to find a whole site that's a Linux authority rather than an individual page that talks about Linux a lot. You might not like the system, and that's fine, but to say that it's skewing results to favor a competitive business agenda is completely different.

Re:Paranoid? Maybe not..

[1010011010]

Click on this (Redhat article):
http://g.msn.com/0PNENGB/1?http://c.moreover.com/c lick/here.pl?z103279857&z=237487 [msn.com]

Why use MSN / Google news?

[Henk Poley]

Don't we have Memigo [memigo.com] for this?

For the unknowing, Memigo is an intelligent news agent. It allows registered users to rate articles. High rated news items will come up on the regular frontpage. When you create a login yourself Memigo will 'learn' what news you like, and via collaborative filtering, others with similar tastes will recommend news items to you.

Newsbot tracks IP Addresses.

[Azureflare]

OK, I searched for MSN news on google news. The first thing that came up was an article in the uk. So, I dutifully clicked the link to MSN newsbot from there (I had never visited the MSN newsbot site). I went to their site, and realized it was specific to the UK. I tried deleting uk from uk.newsbot.msn.com, and pressed enter. Whoops! It sent me right back to uk.newsbot.msn.com. So, I thought there was some kind of cookie or something. I went through my cookies, looking for msn, or microsoft related stuff, and deleted a lot (Closed my browser before doing this). Well, guess what. When I typed in newsbot.msn.com, it still sent me to uk.newsbot.msn.com. There's some way they are tracking me besides cookies. I'm thinking it's IP or something.

Yes, it definitely is IP, because I just opened up mozilla and it sent me to the uk site when I typed in newsbot.msn.com. I refuse to use any site that tracks me by my ip address, or any means that I cannot control.

Also, I tried it on other machines on my network, and it did the same thing. You try it too!

More news is good news

[russotto]

And the best part about it is this is a new source of registration-not-required New York Times links.