Microsoft Claims Worlds Best Search Engine Soon 536
kw writes "Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google in six months in the United States and Britain followed by Europe, its European president said on Wednesday. "What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google," said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa. That timing would presumably coincide more or less with the launch of Vista."
same trick as msn search (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:2)
In the last year or so, Microsoft have never said that they'll make quality products - instead, this article says things like "Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google" and quotes someone as "What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google". They're not saying that they want to make a good search engine - just beating Google will suffice.
Thank
Vista phising protection (Score:5, Interesting)
This is sold as a "phising protection" - microsoft has a list of "bad" sites and the browser will know when you're being a victim of phising.
On the other hand, this is also a useful trick to know what pages are visiting the 90% of the world population, a really interesting data source for a search engine.
Re:Vista phising protection (Score:3, Informative)
This is true but you can turn this "feature" off.
Re:Vista phising protection (Score:4, Insightful)
I think GP's point was how, once again, Microsoft will use their OS monopoly to compete unfairly in another market (here, search engines. somehow the concept of searching online has now become a market...)
In other words, who cares if you can turn it off? Most users won't. How many people turned off that fucking Clippy thing in Office? Not enough of em.
Re:Vista phising protection (Score:3, Insightful)
If it is a big box full of text with an 'ok' button it might as well be on by default. Doubly so if it is more than one page/frame/prompt.
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:3, Insightful)
Too many people are skimping on quality content, and spending more and more time trying to "please Google". It has just gotten to the point of silliness.
It's gotten to be a real problem. You can have crap content but come in first or second if you obsess over optimization, but if you simply concentrate on content, and not Google, you may not come up in a search.
I'll would like to see an engine
Better search tech not as good as NEW search tech. (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember back in the day, when I was switching from webcrawler to yahoo because of result relevancy. Then it was "metacrawler" after which I just started using google directly.
My thought around the "metacrawler" switch was that no search engine can possibly return relevant results indefinately: the scum will eventually figure out the tricks and overwhelm through sheer numbers the good sites. I resigned myself to switching engines every so often.
I had
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:2)
I also don't trust MS marketing B
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:2)
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:2)
One thing I know, Windows XP crsahes a lot less than Windows 95. I have not seen a BSOD in Windows XP but had one on a daily basis in Windows 95.
What about USB? There is a lot of new stuff on this front.
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:2)
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:2)
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:3, Insightful)
Eh ? Windows has an _excellent_ record of being usable on older hardware. Typically if it's 5 years old or newer, it'll run the latest version of Windows either out of the box or with some very minor tweaks/upgrades.
Windows XP and 2003, for example, are quite usable on ca. 1998 PCs if they're bumped up to 512M or more of RAM. They're both usab
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:3, Insightful)
But you would be able to run XFCE and a lightweight web browser. Under Windows you'd have to use 95 and a very old version of Explorer.
Quoted for hilarity. You've obviously never used a Linux command line.
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:2)
What "woke me up" was when I had an email conversation about subcloning and plasmids with my friend. I went the second day to che
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:2)
and how can microsoft say that they will be better than google in 6 months ? google
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:2)
Well...to be fair, I certainly haven't noticed any improvement in Google's search result over the past 6 months. If anything, they've continually gotten worse over the years. Google has done a lot of other nifty stuff, sure. But it seems like improvements to the web search function have been minimal.
Re:same trick as msn search (Score:3, Insightful)
same way they can say "Spam Will Be 'Solved' In 2 Years"
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=17500979 [informationweek.com]
you redefine what you really meant when you look at what you accomplished in 6 months. better could be database size, it could be speed of execusion, it could be lower % add buffer. whatever 1 (or more) area(s) msn excells at over google, will be defined as proof of better.
I hope they do (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't mind that it's Microsoft, so long as the site is accessible from multiple operating systems and browsers. I honestly don't mind who it is, but I would appreciate seeing the link-farm problems disappearing. A competitor getting rid of them, and without plastering adverts of their own everywhere, would get my searching.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:I hope they do (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I hope they do (Score:2)
Google will not arbitrarily filter stuff out like about.com since quite a few people actually use it. At best google will allow you to customize google.com/ig to filter sites, but all those queries will be logged with your username, which is something I would rather avoid.
Re:I hope they do (Score:2)
Re:I hope they do (Score:2)
Re:I hope they do (Score:2)
Don't forget "Experts Exchange". My last company paid for a subscription to that and most of the answers are either "RTFM" or just pulled straight from the newsgroup posting that is right under the 7 experts exchange hits on google. (Or, even more commonly, an RTFM pulled straight from the newsgroup...)
I'd also like a separate search space for web-ified mailing lists. I don't like the first 20 hits for any technical question I ask being somebody (occasionally even me) asking the same question on a mailing
Pardon my cynicism. (Score:2)
Re:Pardon my cynicism. (Score:2)
Re:Pardon my cynicism. (Score:2)
Vista I suppose would go along line of "consumer rights killer", "choice killer", "linux killer" or "mac os x killer". Everyone would get it preinstalled on all kinds of gadgets so it would immediately become "most popular" & "ubiquitous"...
Thanks God, despite the "Killer" line of products from M$, we still have the choice: linux, mac os x & freeciv.
Its about time. (Score:4, Interesting)
Until three months ago, microsoft search seemed to favor front pages of sites to a ridiculous degree. Most of the traffic to the sites I monitor came in from the msn search engine to the front page. This was despite the fact that the crawler had visited scores of sub-pages. The only reason I can think of for this is that branded search terms would probably give better results. If you search for the name of a company, you would almost be certain to get their home page. It was almost no good for finding facts though. Recently this has begun to change and sub-pages are starting to see hits referred from msn search.
I'm hoping that Yahoo picks things up too. With their recent purchase of del.icio.us, they have another fairly substantial datasource of popularity of pages. I'm hoping that they start giving Google a run for their money as well. I'm less optimistic with them though as their relevency team seems to be out of touch with users such as myself. They seem to highly favor in-house content over better external content and they seem to think that much of what people search for is items to purchase rather than facts or even product reviews.
Re:Its about time. (Score:2)
And those bright people give us Dance Dance Revolution to remove spam
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/14121
Re:Its about time. (Score:2)
How much did they pay you [penny-arcade.com] to write that?
Re:Its about time. (Score:2)
It is known that MS infiltrates online forums to promote their agenda.
Maybe now they are smarter and have outsourced this PR campaign through another company, like the Baystar deal. Something not so easy to track back to MS...
Secret Ingredient: Nice Guys Finish First (Score:2)
* Bright people working for them
* msnbot has been crawling as much as googlebot for well over a year
Put those two together: a good source of data and a bunch a bright people and you should be able to build a great search engine.
You've forgotten the (not so ) secret ingredient, that only Google bother implementing. On the internet, competitio
Re:Its about time. (Score:2)
Re:Its about time. (Score:2)
From my perspective:
Google serves me, and makes money in the process.
Microsoft serves itself, makes money, and might serve me in the process.
But I have the perspective of many others found here. I don't know how much of that perspective, wrt Google vs Microsoft is shared by the general population.
It all boils down to this: Are the search results near the top useful?
The common impression today is that Google returns the most useful links near the top. The only way Microsoft can move up in thi
Re:Its about time. (Score:2)
-Eric
another low trick by M$FT against GOOG (Score:2)
This seems more a ploy to "fucking kill google"'s stock price and force them to go into some sort of scramble panic and take risks. I'm sure that they're working on some crap they think can rival google. But from what I've seen of live.com and start.com. They have no idea how to make an easy to use navigatable interface. I of course even did them t
easy... (Score:3, Funny)
OK, Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)
However - and this is big - how can Microsoft change the habits and behavior of many millions of users? Google has almost become synonymous with "web search" in the hearts and minds of millions. Particularly among the folks under 20 (lots and lots of people in my life), the phrase "Google it" is used maybe more than once a day. I like to use much of Google as it is - familiar, reliable (as much as I need it to be), and always extremely quick.
Can Microsoft become more important and more used than Google? I guess anything's possible, but I think time might tell us otherwise.
Do you remember (Score:5, Insightful)
"However - and this is big - how can Microsoft change the habits and behavior of many millions of users?"
AltaVista used to be *the* search engine a long time ago. So you could go back a few years and ask the same question about Google.
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
My parents say "Google it." and they're 65 year old retirees.
That's incredible mindshare. Now MS might make a better search engine but to think they'll root out Google in 6 months time is just marketing talk. No one really believes it.
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
I can't remember who this quote was attributed to, but the universal truth is:
"And this too shall come
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
Altavista was a nice project, I always liked that about their beginnings. Their "about" section at one point said "we started this because we wanted to see if we can index the entire Web". You gotta love that, and I think they succeeded there.
Except that at some point they sold out or
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
Before Google I used Yahoo mostly. AltaVista is much harder to type and Yahoo and Google only need 3 letters to type vs 6.
Actually, AltaVista wins this competition easily: Only two letters are required (a and v).
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
And, Altavista never did email, maps, personal webpages, or advertising. People would rather get everything from a source they can trust (Microsoft, anyone?) than use a different search engine, a different email, and yet another company for blogs.
As good as MS's search engine may be, google has already dominated pretty much all the web-based products out there. (MS reall
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
I beg to differ. Altavista had much of what Google has today, and they had it in the 90s. They offered email accounts @altavista.com, the offered some customization, and if anything they had too much advertising, to the point they started watering the results. They had image search IIRC, and newsgroups search. They may have had some partnership with an online mailing list website, I don't recall clearly.
Except they didn't put everything
Re:Do you remember (Score:2)
Alta Vista used to end up choked by the advertisers and marketers adding in spurious words to the pages.
It was also not that user friendly to get a decent search on the go (although not too bad once you got used to it).
Google on the other hand had (and still has) an excellent algorithm for gathering what you want from a very basic search string that's very user friendly.
It also does this very quickly. I changed from Alta Vista (and Webcrawler be
Re:OK, Maybe... (Score:2)
So perhaps maybe Google can build a search engine solution that is "better" than Yahoo. Of course, there's no way to know until it is useable.
However - and this is big - how can Google change the habits and behavior of many millions of users? Yahoo has almost become synonymous with "web search" in the hearts and minds of millions.
- September 21, 1999
Re:OK, Maybe... (Score:2)
I saw a movie last night (Yours, Mine, and Ours) and they used the term "googled' in the movie, refering to googling for information.
Google's more than a website, it's becoming a common household word.
I smell another antitrust trial coming (Score:2)
Re:I smell another antitrust trial coming (Score:2)
Anyway, they won't get slapped with an anti-trust suit for just creating a new search engine, let alone talking about creating a new search engine. What would be anti-trust worthy would be integrating the search engine in with their new operating system. We won't see if that's the case until later this year, and I suspect that even Microsoft aren't arro
I'd believe it. (Score:2)
Try to select half a word in Word, just try (Score:2)
They can't even allow me to select the words I want in a paragraph!
It's the whole thing or none at all. If they can't resist telling me what I want to select, they will not make it easy for me to visit the sites I want.
Microsofts old tricks... (Score:2)
And why 6 months, what will they do that is so magical in 6 months?
Re:Microsofts old tricks... (Score:2)
Amiga CDTV? Amiga CD32? New AmigaOS? A few dumb investments that didn't even partially return the costs, or didn't even come to life, all after years of stagnation and Commodore died.
Atari Jaguar, Tower ST, Atari Portfolio, and Atari died. Rapid burst of products nobody asked for and nobody really wanted, lots of hype nobody bought, flo
search this (Score:2)
Re:search this (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2, Interesting)
* Microsoft will dominate the digital lifestyle soon
* Microsoft will be better than iTunes any day now
* Microsoft will soon fucking kill Google
* Microsoft will soon prevail with its Windows Media architecture over the standard standards
* Microsoft is not evil
Keyword (Score:2)
we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place
Not desktop, not user browser, not result list. Market place exactly.
I think Overture tried that already: selling positions in search. It was a flop.
Better for whom? (Score:2)
Haven't we heard this before? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were going to have a search engine better than Google, they would just do it, not announce it 6 months in advance. What, do they think that we need to prepare for this momentous event? Like our society isn't ready for a search engine of this power yet, so they need to warn us 6 months in advance to give us time to prepare?
Stop making announcements and do it already.
Signs of desperation? (Score:2)
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/20/022 7200 [slashdot.org]
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/ 13/1925229 [slashdot.org]
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/ 24/1734257 [slashdot.org]
Re:Haven't we heard this before? (Score:2)
Re:Haven't we heard this before? (Score:2)
I would give that line of thinking some credibility if we hadn't already [release1-0.com] heard [theregister.co.uk] this [techwhack.com] before [softpedia.com].
Note - Every one of those articles is older than 6 months. Once, I was like you and wanted to believe the hype. Now, I'm just cynical.
Re:Haven't we heard this before? (Score:3, Funny)
Very simple, they want to catch those big bosses who are afraid of choosing the wrong technology. People may have been thinking "I WAS going to search for something today... But what if I use the wrong search engine? I'd better wait six months and see how this MSN thing looks and try again."
Microsoft has done this before (Score:2)
Since that fiasco*, I'll be a pessimist about these news.
* = it's not really that terrible for a modern engine IMHO, but when Google exist and is at least as good, why switch? It seems most ended up using that logic.
Why give the competition a heads up? (Score:2)
Same reason they announced NT (Score:2)
Eventually - ten years late - Windows NT somewhere near met its promise. Was it a failure? Of course not - even as vapourware it killed OS/2.
Re:It used to work in the old days (Score:2)
Kill the competition by making them die from laughter, well, a tactic too.
Microsoft vs. Google (Score:2)
Google offers everything for free (with a little bit of advertising,) can Microsoft claim that? I think not.
If Google offers a free O/S, that would be hard to beat.
Don't be evil, speak no lies, and throw no chairs.
Impossibility. (Score:2)
Microsoft just don't have what it takes.
It won't be at all innovative and it will be so skewed towards whatever products or services Microsoft are selling that it just won't be useful. The only way they will get market share is becuase they will make it difficult to not have their search engine as the default in vista. No doubt some 'security agent' or somesuch will keep resetting it if you change it.
Re:Impossibility. (Score:2)
What about the ... (Score:2)
Follow us, we are the leader.... (Score:2)
why not bundle? (Score:2)
I tend to think they should integrate it. I would love to have a text entry box along the task bar where I can enter a search term and then have the results pop up in IE. Integrating it would make it easier to search locally too.
Eventually they will have targeted ads on everyone's desktop, which they will (hope
Re:why not bundle? (Score:2)
Yepperz, they already do. In XP.
New install of XP. Very slow connection. I wanted to check something in docs for MySQL. These of you who know the docs, know it comes in a "convenient" 1.6MB HTML file. So I start downloading the file, 30 or so minutes pass and I play with tweaking the desktop in the meantime. I enter the "Plus" tab, change some settings and suddenly MSIE pops into v
Hahaha! (Score:2)
Consider the source (Score:2)
Six months is a long time... (Score:2)
So, in six months Microsoft claims to be better than what Google is today. Do they expect Google to be sleeping in the meantime?
In other news... (Score:2)
Duke Nukem will be out soon, too, and if you order before the end of the month, it will be delivered in a flying car.
Yeah... (Score:2)
They aren't wrong (Score:2)
For Microsoft "More Ubiquitous" == "Better". Just as with a hundred other technologies they've unfairly leveraged their existing OS monopoly to spread, they will integrate their search engine fully into Vista (probably with some sort of "It's part of the OS, we can't remove it" claim) and they will be more relevent to the US marketplace at that point. That is unless the government steps in and smacks them down for re-committing the same crime they've already been convicted of...
...Yeah, I couldn't write t
Another Anti-trust case? (Score:2)
Sorta figures really. Microsoft did it with IE and set the default page to MSN. They didn't get in trouble for that.
So everyone as they start picking up the desktop search stuff will be using that as well for internet searches, if they can get their shit together, there is no reason why they couldn't get a large portion of the market back from the Vista OS base.
If they start feeding part of the data from the desktop s
"Relevant in the marketplace" (Score:2)
Snif-Snif.... (Score:2)
"Fucking Kill Google?" (Score:2)
The only way I will even consider Microsoft search (Score:2)
1.They have ads that are as unobtrusive as google adwords.
2.They can gaurantee me that the search results are 100% free from any attempts by unscruplous page owners to boost their results using underhanded tricks (cf the recent BMW case)
3.They can gaurantee me that their search results are 100% accurate and that no-one has paid Microsoft any money to get higher results
4.They can gaurantee me that they wont sell any info they collect to nasty people (spammers etc)
and 5.They can come up with cool logos
Re:Relivant? (Score:2)
You're totally missing the bigger picture here. Obviously, the man knows something you don't: that in six months, Europe will take over America. So it's perfectly logical that Microsoft's European president will be taking over Ballmer's job.
Re:I wouldn't doubt it's the truth (Score:2)
That's because Toyota's don't randomly crash for no reason at all.
(Sorry, it had to be said.)
Re:I wouldn't doubt it's the truth (Score:2)
I take by your "(Sorry, it had to be said.)" comment, that this was intended to be funny. But I don't get the joke...? I want to laugh too, please!
Re:I wouldn't doubt it's the truth (Score:2)
Microsoft vs. GM
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 mi/gal."
Recently General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement, "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?"
And...
1. Every time they repainted the lines on t
Re:vapourware (Score:2)
Re:suuuuure.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:All right! (Score:2)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Re:IE Default Page (Score:2)
(*I haven't used IE in several years)
Re:6months is a LONG time (Score:2)
Your 6 month time frame is a bit optimistic. A fly-by-night web site may be gone in six months, but some things stick around.
Google has a 100 Billion Market cap with 8billion in cash and they are making money on search. I doubt they will give up search any time soon when they make up to $100 per click on ad words.
Just for fun, go do a few click throughs on "luxury yacht" or "private jet" just to make google a few more hundred...
Re:The difference... (Score:3, Insightful)
More importantly, M$ regularily delivers less than was promised, later than promised. Apple quite often delivers earlier than promised (see PPC-Intel switch) and often more than promised (see MacBook Pro CPU upgrade just prior to shipping).