Inspecting MSN Search 345
ins0maniac writes "I compared Yahoo, Google and MSN's image search. I noticed that, MSN's search had images from only a few sites. I searched for keywords britney spears and randomly checked few pages upto page number 20 and found that the 400 images were only from 3 domains :| 5in9.com, celebritypicturesarchive.com and nabou.com. This is totally weird as it doesn't seem like a search engine, but a collection of few online galleries." There's a number of other interesting notes in the entry about the new search engine. Also, Britney.
This doesn't help me (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This doesn't help me ***Not work safe*** (Score:2)
Standard MS Tactics (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Launch a web site in a particular genre but don't actually have any real functionality
2. Distribute a press release
3. PROFIT!!
Re:Standard MS Tactics (Score:5, Interesting)
Ex.
-IE debacle, where Microsoft played catch-up to Netscape and other existing browsers after failing to neglect thier need in earlier years.
-Direct3D, which played second fiddle to OpenGL for years in usability and features till Microsoft finally began adopting parts of OpenGL's paradigm for computer graphics.
-The modern desktop GUI. A product of Apple in many respects, but later was adopted by Microsoft.
-Powerpoint, Visio and other 'Office' products. They were created by other companies, and then consumed by Microsoft.
And the list goes on and on. Today thier trying to same with hand-held media players (derived from the success of iPods), search technologies (coming from Yahoo, Google, and other succesfull search/advertisement ventures), spyware detection and many other Microsoft 'Innovations' that are soon to hit the market.
Re:Standard MS Tactics (Score:2)
Re:Standard MS Tactics (Score:4, Insightful)
Internet Explorer: Played catch-up to Netscape, caught it up, then overtook it. Now it's the world's widest-used and most well-known browser and Netscape was beaten into obscurity.
Direct3D: Might have been behind OpenGL, but they took the qualities of OpenGL and made a product that at least matches it on features and blows it out of the water in regards to market share.
Modern Desktop GUI: Yes they were playing catch-up with Apple, who in turn got the concept from Xerox, but they worked on the idea and now they have practically the whole desktop market saturated so much that even a possibly technically-superior free operating system struggles to get a foothold.
Office products? Yes they may have been created by other companies, but Microsoft took them, and all 'Clippy' jokes aside, they turned it into a very decent product and it's dominated the market, and the 'other companies' are languishing on the sidelines.
You may like to bash Microsoft for taking on other people's ideas, but what company only sells things they've entirely invented from scratch? Apple didn't invent MP3 players, Google didn't invent search engines, I don't see you bashing them, the originators of most technologies are dead and buried because they didn't do anything with them.
In the real world, if you invent something, unless you patent it or implement it successfully, no-one cares that you invented it.
Re:Standard MS Tactics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Standard MS Tactics (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Standard MS Tactics (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Standard MS Tactics (Score:3, Interesting)
MS-DOS a product bought from another company.
Licensed to IBM partially through having the rails at IBM greased by a friend of the Gates family on IBM's board.
Other DOS products are later coming to market because all of the IBM PC's and software were shipped and built with MS-DOS. First to market equal a temporary but real "natural monopoly"
Windows is introduced, goes no where (1.1)
New Windows (2.0) goes nowhere.
Windows 3 comes out and interest grows. About this time DR-DOS starts to make in-roads with a smaller memory footprint and better tools.
Through all early versions of Windows MS-DOS compatibility is a key requirement because they hold the dominant position in that market.
Windows 3.1 comes out with a mysterious message that indicates using anything other than MS-DOS could have dire consequences (not just opinion a court found this to be anti-competitive behavior years after the fact) 3.0, 3.1, 3.11 all contain some "peer networking" to help eat away at the Novell NOS. (not non-competetive, very shrewd)
OS/2 (first big "non-dos" OS for IBM PC's since CPM) written by MS for IBM. The enterprise market shows interest.
OS/2 version 2 comes out, hailed as the future by Microsoft and IBM.
Development of OS/2 slows, friction between IBM and MS.
IBM pulls OS/2 away from MS, because it becomes apparent that MS has been dragging it's feet so that it has time to develop a competing product.
DR-DOS begins to rebuild from the "mysterious" message in 3x versions of windows. But it is too late, Windows 95 comes out almost impossible to separate it from MS-DOS. Now the GUI is king for sure.
Windows NT comes out. Runs text mode OS/2 apps because of a shared code base.
So there you go. Get the business through inside contacts (hey it's business, it happens), screw one competitor and pay the (small) price in court later to keep your momentum. Screw a partner to buy time, ideas and capital for your next generation product...PROFIT!
Re:Standard MS Tactics (Score:3, Insightful)
MS didn't beat the competition, the competition was unfairly bludgeoned into defeat.
IE: bundled with OSes. Unfair tying when you're a monopoly.
Direct3D: bundled with OS. Marketing BS, promises, and incentives to developers, who fell for it.
"Modern desktop GUI": you're kidding, right? Next and OS/2 were the most advanced, arguably even by today's standards. (Haven't seen Be)
Office Products: Again, you must be kidding. They used threats of increased OS prices to force vendors to bundle Office, so everyone got Office with their new PC. Several incompatible versions of Office later, everyone was forced to upgrade. Why? Well, when the big wigs in government, for example, got their new PCs with Office 97, everyone they dealt with had to upgrade, which cascades quite quickly throughout a 3+ million person organization that does incredible amounts of business with outside companies.... I wonder what that means for the rumored Mac adoption?
Oh, and why doesn't Word allow me to do multiple page unmbering within a document easily? (Well, I stopped trying after OfficeXP) I'm talking about index page numbering, and then starting over with page "1" within a single document? It's not easy to do, if you can get it to do it at all. Also, why does Word print documents differently on different printers? I thought I specified the format, and the printer was subject to my whims, not the other way around? These observations by and large also apply to their other products, which are all pretty much crap.
So, I don't like to bash MS for taking other people's ideas. I'm obligated by my sense of ethics and morality to post the truth when presented with incorrect data.
Don't Underestimate Micro$oft (Score:4, Interesting)
The current barrier to entering the market for search engines is low. The technology is relatively simple as the multitude of search-engine companies will attest.
The advantage that M$ has, over Google, is its huge R&D budget. M$ labs is the modern-day equivalent of the venerable Bell Laboratories, which is shriveling under the management of Lucent. M$ has plucked numerous professors from the computer science departments at top universities by offering incredibly high salaries.
Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft (Score:3, Insightful)
"The advantage that M$ has, over Google, is its huge R&D budget. "
--
Today's news said Google had raked in money which exceeded by many times its expectations - to the tune of several millions in advertising revenues alone. And it has a share base of more than a billion. So money is not a problem as far as Google is concerned.
reporter(666905) also said:
"M$ has plucked numerous professors from the computer science departments at top universities by offering incredibly high salaries."
--
True. But Google also has its share of scientists who are busy bringing out inovations. "Google News" being an excellent example. http://news.google.com
ravee
--
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com
Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft (Score:3, Informative)
The advantage that M$ has, over Google, is its huge R&D budget.
Not really. Their advantage is that they have a monopoly consumer OS's. They will bundle their search with their OS, which is already bundled with their browser and their media player. Most users will never think to install something better, or go to google when their is a search already built in. It does not have to be as good as Google. It does not have to be close. It only has to be functional enough to barely work for most people's searches. It can return only 1/3 of the results Google does and have 10 times the ads and lack most of the cool features. All that it has to do is return basic results for the top 1K searches and it will win. You can't beat a monopoly's bundling without a vastly better system for the average user.
Think of it this way. If the telephone company gave out free cheese with every phone bill, what would happen to cheese sellers? Most would have to stop selling cheese. Maybe the phone company's cheese is not as good, but if it is not terrible, most people won't go buy more cheese from somewhere else. There will always be cheese and computer aficionados that will pay to get the best, but that is only about 5% of the market. The rest goes to the monopoly (which is why what MS is doing was made illegal in the first place).
Re:Don't Underestimate Micro$oft (Score:3, Insightful)
M$ will make it one click eaisier to use m$earch in stead of any other search, and it will matter.
But google will be here for quite a while.
I seriously couldn't do my job without google. It is by far, the best tool I've ever had. I tried about 10-30 searches in m$ (all of which gave me the info on top 3-4 of page 1 in google), I had to go several pages to find pseuro related sites. (and half of the searches didn't find what I needed with the simple search terms.)
Re:Standard MS Tactics (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, MS has never really been known as an industry leader. They are a huge marketing machine. There's nothing wrong with that, you just have to realize that you don't have to be a market leader to be a success. I think that classic "tech" people often forget this.
I searched for keywords britney spears and ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ... (Score:3, Funny)
You, my friend, live in a weird world.
Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ... (Score:4, Funny)
It makes for an entertaining bibliography to a research project.
Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ... (Score:4, Informative)
Sometimes, it's fun to be a physics grad...
Re:I searched for keywords britney spears and ... (Score:2)
No kidding. Thought some guy in my research group was nuts when he told me Britney knew a lot about band structure of semiconductors. But turns out, it's true!
A revenue stream.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The real task, it would seem, would be to find a way to have the engine return the proper pictures for the proper searches (so typing in Daddy's birthday doesn't result in pictures of some 50 something dude banging some barely legal chick with a party hat on.)
Stuff like that.
Re:A revenue stream.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The galleries in question probably pay for dominance
That's what I think however I didn't see results from Corbis.com [corbis.com] (BillG's stock photo company) in any results of searches that I did. And I did search for pretty generic stuff (ie: "ansel adams" who, I believe, Corbis owns the rights to)
Re:A revenue stream.. (Score:2)
Yeah, this seems contrary to a full free search, but at least the results are on subject.
How much do you think they'd charge to put the goatse.cx guy in a search for sailboats?
search filtering (Score:2, Insightful)
Errrr.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Other searches [msn.co.uk] don't appear to be similar. I'm guessing that perhaps these companies have paid for higher placement on the example used in the article?
search for "linux" (Score:5, Interesting)
www.microsoft.com
Windows outperforms Linux: Industry case studies and test lab results provide insight into the advantages of the Microsoft®...
Re:search for "linux" (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess the search engine is not so bad after all.
Re:search for "linux" (Score:3, Interesting)
OVERTURE (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Errrr.... (Score:2)
Re:Errrr.... (Score:2)
I guess if you consider about a year as "new." Surely in a year it has managed to crawl more sites, otherwise it is a pointless search engine, as it will always be out of date and behind the times.
Re:Errrr.... (Score:2)
Should the search engine determine which domain has the best pictures, or should I be able to get *all* the results and determine that myself?
I do agree that basing a conclusion on a single search result is a bad idea (and that the cache has a ways to go), but if your reasoning is true that's a good reason not to use MSN's search. Along the lines of "determining the best domains," how would we know if these domains' owners haven't payed MS a little cash to "determine" this? Either way, I'd rather make that decision on my own.
Doesn't work very well yet (Score:5, Funny)
Forget about Britney! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Forget about Britney! (Score:5, Funny)
It's really odd you mention that. That's exactly how I got *here* [slashdot.org].
Re:Forget about Britney! (Score:2)
Searching for WMDs still brings up "not found"...
Re:Doesn't work very well yet (Score:2)
Re:Doesn't work very well yet (Score:2)
In the interest of the truth... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm going to have to perform this experiment myself.
In the interest of the truth, you know.
it's ok, you can admit it... (Score:2)
we /.-ers certainly hate her music but apparently she's not as painful to look at. :D
msn search may not be as good as google/yahoo, but the prominent-cleavages-to-image-number ratio is quite high for all three search engines. who's complaining? :P
Other options? (Score:5, Funny)
Would you rather the author did an image search on RMS?
Re:Other options? (Score:2)
Now whether or not that is a good thing, I'll leave up to the reader.... :-)
Re:it's ok, you can admit it... (Score:2)
I seem to recall (Score:5, Insightful)
mirrordot link (Score:5, Informative)
mirrordot doesn't seem to have archived all the images yet though...
Thumbnails Don't Match (Score:5, Funny)
Many of the thumbnails displayed aren't the same picture that's retrieved when you click on the link. So, their cache must be outdated already. When I'm browsing thumbnails, I expect...no I demand...my search engine to return the appropriate photos!
Re:Thumbnails Don't Match (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, it's a wonder nobody has started spoofing image thumbnails by returning a different image when a Googlebot comes by.
Surfer: Mmmmm... Hot, nude bored housewives...
*click*
Website: Hello.jpg!
Expectations (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, I don't expect any reviews of MSN search to be any good so early on either. Simply because, if you're a googler or some other search engine user, you like what that one offers for a reason; switching is hard.
Re:Expectations (Score:2)
I used to use Altavista and I hated it with a passion. It would return reams of junk sites stuffed with meta keywords. As soon as I discovered Google I jumped ship immediately simply because Alta Vista stunk and Google didn't. And it still doesn't.
Of course when Google works so well, switching is going to be hard. After all, what does MSN Search (or A9.com for that matter) do that I need? Sure they might have some unique features, but to take A9.com as a site I've tried, those features are mostly gimicks and some of them are very odious - such as tying your searches to your Amazon.com cookie, and sticking a9.com search bars in annoying places on sites like imdb.com.
If MSN do the same or direct you to "partner sites", or deliver less accurate results (likely) or associate your searches with your MSN id, they may as well flush their money down the toilet since its doomed to mediocrity. Besides which other portals such as Yahoo! have established search engines, and I'd be surprised if they got a tenth of the traffic of Google, so what's so amazing about the MSN engine?
Microsoft business model (Score:3, Insightful)
Those of us who've been around a while know the well-worn pattern:
(1) MS sits on arse for years doing no innovation while another company produces an innovative, excellent, useful product and spends several years refining it and making it even better
(2) Start to take notice as another company starts to get a lot of limelight in some mainstream market "space" it never occurred to you to enter
(3) Announce intention to compete.
(4) Spend the next couple of years with half-hearted attempt to play catch-up, producing a mediocre equivalent that's not really even terribly good. After a few hit-and-miss betas, announce "version 1" with much fanfare and lots of fawning press releases, with a product that basically brings customers what was already available five years ago from the innovative competitor, blatantly copied down to detailed elements of the user interface but it 'feels' like 'just a poor clone'
(5) Spend another couple of years watching in frustration at low adoption rates of your product. Slowly improve product until it meets a "good enough" standard (still not as good as competitors, but "good enough"), and then ...
(6) ... shove it down customers' throats by abusing desktop OS monopoly: Integrate own product into the next version of Windows so tightly that people almost have to use it, e.g. put MSN search box right into taskbar thus making it far less convenient to use other search engines.
(7) Gain market share rapidly. Fawning press hails you as a great innovator. Ten years later, everyone thinks you practically pioneered Internet searching.
Will it work this time? Probably.
Mark my words, Longhorn will have an MSN search box built into the taskbar.
Lack of returned hits... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Lack of returned hits... (Score:2)
But it's only catalogued three domains. What, is it searching depth-first?
Re:Lack of returned hits... (Score:2)
Not very scientific.
Re:Lack of returned hits... (Score:2)
I don't know about depth searching, but there's definite;y something wrong with msn's search strategy.
Re:Lack of returned hits... (Score:2)
I'm just pointing out that if they're not including a lot of sites but they do spider mine a couple of times a day, they're doing something wrong with their technology.
Re:Lack of returned hits... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lack of returned hits... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lack of returned hits... (Score:2)
Perhaps, but they still have been crawling the web for months... should be plenty of time.
Re:Lack of returned hits... (Score:2)
Seems unlikely, as the MSN search has been under development and actively crawling for something like a year now at least. I've seen its bot crawling my own websites many months back.
Re:Lack of returned hits... (Score:2)
I don't think "they haven't been doing it as long" counts for much when you're talking about a company with tens of billions in its warchest and a targeted mission to topple competitors.
Slashdotted (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless the images are titled, tagged, annotated, etc., there's no good way to index them.
If I just throws a bunch of images up on a web site, there's not good technology, other than some pretty advanced facial recognition stuff, that can determine who, or what, a particular picture represents.
Change the resolution, color depth, etc. and I change the checksum for the image, so the index fails to recognize that one picture is the "same" as another, just resized, etc.
I see a lot of that on Google's image search - but can't find a way around it, either.
Re:Slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)
Change the resolution, color depth, etc. and I change the checksum for the image, so the index fails to recognize that one picture is the "same" as another, just resized, etc.
So resize the image to a standard max size and depth (256x256 max size jpeg with retained aspect ratio), then hash the individual luminance data into a thumbprint that can be compared. Checking for dupes becomes easier and similarity checks are doable.
it looks like... (Score:5, Interesting)
this is contrary to google image search where it's not simply searching for filenames. google search seems to understand that images of britney spears need not have "britney" and "spears" in the filename.
Too New. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has been around for years spidering sites where MSN Search has only been around for a few months.
The real test is going to be a year from now, when it's had more than enough time to spider a good portion of the web. Even Google's search paled in comparison to Altavista at first until at least 6 months passed. After a year passed its searches were much better since a good portion of the web was spidered by it.
At this point in the game, It would have to be an absoletly amazing site to take Google out, and I don't think MSN Search is the site thats going to do it.
Re:Too New. (Score:2)
Unbelievable! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sorry, but this is where I draw the line-- it's completely unusable
Britany appears under camel toe (Score:3, Informative)
Though, as if to prove your original point, adding 'britney' to that search also gets no results.
P.S. You'll almost certainly like cameltoe.bolt.com [bolt.com]
Re:Unbelievable! (Score:2)
Msn doesn't find Gates' homepage - Google does (Score:4, Funny)
None of the first 10 results (searching from the uk) return his homepage.
Searching with Google [google.com] turns up Bill Gates' Web Site - Home Page [microsoft.com].
Which means: Stick to Google.
Re:Msn doesn't find Gates' homepage - Google does (Score:2, Informative)
Performing an MSN Image Search for "Bill Gates [msn.com]", returns 2,134 images from a variety of web servers, although newsimg.bbc.co.uk seems to be the most popular server that offers images. They apparently didn't screen these, because the 6th and 10th images are Bill's Albuquerque arrest photo, and the ninth photo is a PhotoShopped image of Bill holding up a bright red nazi-like flag and saluting in nazi-esque fashion,...
Der Fuhrer Bill [future-technics.de]
To be fair, a Google Image Search for "Sergey Brin [google.com]", returns 500 images, and a similar search for "Larry Page [google.com]", returns 1,140 images.
Search for "sex"... (Score:2, Funny)
while the first few result are still remotely related to what I expected (sex offender registries, sex - by teens for teens), the ninth link is cool:
Microsoft Corporation
The entry page to Microsoft's Web site. Find software, solutions, answers, support, and Microsoft
* www.microsoft.net
I'm amazed how stupid and desperate these guys there must be.
Re:Search for "sex"... (Score:2)
Because everyon keeps asking... (Score:2, Informative)
goto:
http://search.msn.com [msn.com]
click settings:
[Which will bring you to:]
http://search.msn.com/settings.aspx?ru=%2f&FORM=S
Try not to get confused and think you're using google...
On the third section from the top click "off"
You'll find the "Save" button in the lower right hand corner if you scroll down.
I was going to read through the source code and post a GET link which would turn it off for you... but I'm not about to read through that code at 8:45 in the morning. Sorry, folks.
PS.. I notice there are different language settings.. do you suppose MS will offer translation services?
Not your usual slashdotting (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm amazed not only that so many posts were made "about" the story from various diagonal points of view, but without anyone actually browsing his site. It's even more interesting that his story got posted at all without the referenced content being reachable. I read a great story once at a web site that's no longer up; maybe I should post it!
Re:Not your usual slashdotting (Score:2, Informative)
First Poster Has Only 400? (Score:2)
At last count I have 2,347 pictures of Britney Spears.
And I don't even like her music...:-)
I wonder how many photos of the Corrs MSN can find...I've got 2,080 photos of them...
How about 1,228 of Salma Hayek?
1,406 of Angelina Jolie?
1,083 of Carmen Electra?
24 of Chelsea Clinton? Waitaminnit, WTF?
Re:The important question... (Score:2)
Right - not a problem...
Bug in MSN Search Feedback (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bug in MSN Search Feedback (Score:2)
No feedback for reporting bugs in a Microsoft product?
Wow, there's a surprise!
After, "security is a priority", according to Bill the other day...
Guess that means the best security in the Microsoft world is "Don't wanna hear it!"
Konqueror said ..... (Score:2)
http://www.msn.com/ line 149:
TypeError: Attempt at calkling a function that expects a HTMLDocument on a Window.
Quick comparison (Score:2, Funny)
Search term: microsoft sucks
Google: results about 862,000
Yahoo: results about 762,000
MSN: results about 1,856,364
There's a joke in there somewhere dying to get out.
Relevance filtering (Score:2)
Britney? (Score:2, Informative)
Funny sight on MSN image search (Score:2)
Just Tried "The Corrs" (Score:2)
Including some I never saw before...
And yes, a lot of the images link to 404 pages, but I've seen that on Google, too.
Fuzzy Searching (Score:2)
Looking through various search queries in Google and MSN I noticed that Google finds images in pages that barely make a mention to the keyword (and does it accurately). MSN on the other hand the pages have more references to the keyword I am searching for.
I'm not sure why this is, I guess it's just the alor. they use to index.
I'm betting MSN will improve a bit, it takes a while to index the net to the level that Google did. It takes a long while.
I'll be saving a few queries, and comparing them over time, and see how the change. I'm guessing in 6 months the query results will be fairly different.
He didn't turn off domain grouping (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps this guy didn't know the default setting on MSN search is to group results by domain. Maybe he should try agian with this setting off if he wants to see more variety of domains providing Britney pics.
Explicit embedded metadata being ignored (Score:3, Interesting)
Many pictures include this sort of search-rich information, either from the camera or added manually, using cataloging software. Google's Picasa 2 [picasa.com] freeware (Windows only) embeds it's key words just so. Microsoft Research's excellent freeware (Windows only) World-Wide Media eXchange [slashdot.org] tools do the same for geo-coding photos. There are numerous other tools that can do the same, leading to a significent set of internally 'tagged' material.
So, why aren't the search engines taking advantage of this? They're already loading the images and creating thumbnails, how much extra work is it to extract any additional information in the file and use that in it's indexing too, especially compared to the potentially increased accuracy?
Interesting search rank (Score:2)
Grouping Image Results Bug (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything about this article is just based on one dumb luck search, and not alot else it seems. Sure it's Microsoft, so it's easy to get all het up, where as if Google made the same mistake, everyone would be much more likely to try figure out what the real deal was.
Related Joke (Score:4, Funny)
A scientist is conducting experiments on cockroach behavior. First day he cuts off one leg of a cockroaach and shouts walk. The cockroach is able to walk limpily. Second day he cuts off the second leg and shouts walk. The cockroach is still able to move around. Third day he cuts off his third leg and shouts walk. The cockroach tries hard to move and is able to do that. Fourth day he cuts off his last leg and shouts walk and obviously cockroach is unable to move. The conclusion: When you cut all the four legs of a cockroach the cockroad goes deaf!!!
Re:Maybe I am being dense but.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Howto (Score:2)
Re:Howto (Score:2)
Re:Why god, Why? (Score:2)
You're right...and I've got 707 pictures of either Paris, Nicky or both...(with or without Nicole Ritchie)...
And for the record, Paris is better looking (if a bit skinnier) than Britney...
Also, Paris makes no bones about actually fucking...
The only remaining question is: which one is dumber? I mean, Britney doesn't even know who the Prime Minister of England is WHEN SHE'S IN THE COUNTRY...
Re:Why god, Why? (Score:2)
None of which to say that she might not be stupid - she's certainly done some crazy/foolish things and knowing what little I do about her background it wouldn't suprise me to know that she's a few bricks short of a load.
Re:Why god, Why? (Score:2)
From what I've been told... (Score:2)
--LordPixie