Microsoft Works on Search Capabilities 480
bl8n8r writes "Microsoft is betting millions that someday it will be as well known for search as Google is. Some of its efforts to simplify search on the Internet will soon be in place. The new version of Microsoft's MSN Internet service, available this winter, will include a tool for retrieving digital photos based on images in the pictures. For example, users can ask their computers to retrieve all pictures that include a specific person's face or background."
Search on msdn.microsoft.com (Score:5, Informative)
Has anybody here used the awful search interface they put up on MSDN a couple of months ago? Its hideous. It takes twice as long to find anything as its predecessor did. Googling with site:msdn.microsoft.com is often the only way of finding some documents (I had to do that to find out any information on programming NT Services without using
Searching for a name of one of their programs ("dr watson") doesn't turn up any information on it in the knowledge base. You have to search for 'drwtsn32' to get anywhere, despite the full name of the program being mentioned in the articles about it.
Yeah, great search interface. Really inspires my confidence.
GIFT (Score:2, Informative)
http://viper.unige.ch/demo/
The URL has changed (Score:5, Informative)
The article is now here [cnn.com].
Correct Link (Score:3, Informative)
Semantic Web: best solution (Score:4, Informative)
The technology for the Semantic Web is good enough - people and organizations just have to be willing to add semantic markup. This will enable what I would call knowledge based search. Some good tools are:
HP's semantic web toolkit [hp.com]
Protege Ontology Editor [semanticweb.org]
RDF and semantic web tools for Swi-Prolog [swi-prolog.org]
-Mark
Why not search in eXIF fields? (Score:3, Informative)
Could make for some intresting surgical searches. Want to see what output a specific model of digital camera it makes? Put in the model's name in the right field for EXIF, and see what people have come up with.
Re:Search on msdn.microsoft.com (Score:5, Informative)
Search all microsoft related websites, microsoft.com and others such as www.outlookexchange.com too.
Re:For image searching GNU has The GIFT (Score:3, Informative)
Google has had this for ages (Score:4, Informative)
A search for Dilbert [google.com] Images
A search for Linux [google.com] Images
A search for Hot Grits [google.com]
A search for Natalie Portman [google.com]
Hell, fark.com [fark.com] uses GIS to refer to the results of a Google Image Search.
Seems MS is once again playing catch up and pretending it's a new idea.
Re:domain squatters, and redirects (Score:1, Informative)
It seems to be mostly related with non-specific technical type searches. It's distressing when something
this misinformed makes it to Google's front page.
on
Re:Search on msdn.microsoft.com (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Search on msdn.microsoft.com (Score:3, Informative)
* block their IP address(es)
* block their user agent
* put a line in your robots.txt file and *hope* they honour it
None of these methods are effective against someone who is determined to spider your site. For your purposes, though, you could just use a suitably-crafted wget session to download everything.
You can get more inventive, for example by displaying indistinct images of text and making users submit the word to continue, but there's very little that I can think of that would be effective and wouldn't inconvenience "real" users of your site.
Re:let's illustrate : (Score:5, Informative)
1 - Amazon
2 - Ebay
3 - Introducing Linux by tech.msn.com: "Red Hat 9.0 is a boon for those who already use it, but it's too expensive to warrant a switch from Windows."
4 - Alternatives to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP : "Learn about the Microsoft alternatives and how to move to them from open source products."
(www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/m
Parent was exagerating the place of commercials on MSN: propaganda reduce advertising space a lot.
Re:uh right... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Search on msdn.microsoft.com (Score:2, Informative)
Surf to msdn.microsoft.com
Enter the string "System.Web.UI.WebControls.ListItem" (sans quotation marks) and press "Go"
Enter the same string in the google search toolbar.
I believe that anyone who conducts this simple experiment will quickly be able to determine who has the better search engine.
Re:Search is a trust issue (Score:1, Informative)
The point is, MS doesn't even have to come up with a search engine that is in any way better than Google, or more trustworthy, or whatever. Joe User will look for some way of searching the web, not for the best way. (Proof: We all agree that IE is inferior to most other browsers in terms of quality and privacy, but actually no significant number of people use those better programs. They're looking for some way to browse the web, not the best way.)
I hate that just as much as everyone here, but I think the sad reality is: MS just has to find the right trick how to "default" to their engine (like giving away IE with the OS so that everyone says "why bother installing anything else, it's already there"), and Google could quickly become history. Markets are only reliable up to the point where someone is clever enough to create an ugly backdoor.
Broken link in article try this one instead (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Image Search Request... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:uh right... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually you can get mouse gestures and whole whack of other spiffy extensions/add-ons for Mozilla.
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]
Re:uh right... (Score:2, Informative)
Konqueror not Mozilla-based (Score:2, Informative)
Konqueror is not Mozilla-based. It uses its own rendering engine, KHTML. KHTML is also used by Safari [apple.com].