MSN Search Engine Favors IIS 565
Scud writes "It appears that if you want to rise up in the rankings over at the MSN search engine you would do well to host your page on IIS. Ivor Hewitt has done a study and it appears that by using IIS, you are likely to increase your odds of a higher listing by several percent."
If you only have 20% of the market (Score:2, Informative)
Mirror site: (Score:3, Informative)
Not a controlled experiment (Score:5, Informative)
Just the webserver alone changing. This can happen by taking a popular site and then changing what it reports to the MSN search robots.
But until such an experiment is done, the data is open to too many interpretations.
Re:Would it even be worth it? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Top MSN Rankings (Score:1, Informative)
Either MS has the world's best pattern recognition software by far (facial recognition software requires a lot of cpu work and under ideal circumstances, only accurate slightly more than 50% of the time) or they'd have to have someone sit and go through every picture ever indexed, then press a "Put this site to #1" button.
With Google indexing 8 billion pages, even spending 1/100 of a second per page would make indexing a multiple-year task and pattern rec. should take longer than that. Things like "is_site_running_IIS()" can be done far, far, far faster.
Maybe I've been trolled. Oh well. Hope someone learned something.
Re:Why would i want to do that? (Score:1, Informative)
Apache is a webserver. Zeus is a webserver. IIS is a webserver. thttpd is a webserver. MacOS is an OS.
So, you just lost any credibility with that mindless-drone-MacOS-X-troll. Compare apples to apples, please.
Besides, MacOS X is really not the best platform to run webservers off of -- the hardware is expensive, the OS is expensive. Try again. (hint: FreeBSD, which is really the heart of MacOS X, and runs on dirt-cheap x86{,-64} hardware)
That explains it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Absolutely (Score:3, Informative)
(You do mean this link(San Andreas Radio [tinyted.net]), right?)
MSN - 3rd
Google - 3rd
With quotes around it:
MSN - 2nd
Google - 1rst
With a + (plus sign):
MSN - 2nd
Google - 1rst
I'm not sure where #7 came from (unless others have done repeated searches on this too). Do we know what Rock Star Games is using for their web server then to know if the IIS preference comes into play in this case?
Re:Would it even be worth it? (Score:5, Informative)
- Google 7873
- Yahoo 3163
- MSN 199
- AOL 65
- Dogpile 44
- Unknown 41
- Earth Link 28
- AltaVista 16
- Excite 14
- A9.com 9
- Others 77
...which comes out to about 2% MSN.
Updated report (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If you only have 20% of the market (Score:3, Informative)
If you were joking or being sarcastic well you went right over my head....
Re:Top MSN Rankings (Score:2, Informative)
Because jokes are never obvious to everyone. Different senses of humour, cultural differences and the fact that some people think in different ways from other people (like people with Aspergers - and there are probably one or two people who read
Re:Does the MSN robot have a signature? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I laugh at Microsoft. (Score:3, Informative)
So... No. It is not that way you state it.
Conspiracies of one (Score:4, Informative)
As an example, let's say that one person is a company's bookkeeper and CFO. (This isn't uncommon in small companies.)
As a bookkeeper she cooks the books to cover her embezzlement.
As CFO she prepares false financial documents for her company and its investors.
One person, criminal acts in two roles, so in many states she can be charged with conspiracy in addition to embezzlement.
BTW, this isn't a "conspiracy" in the legal sense since it's not a crime to give preferential service on the basis of web server. It's sleazy unless it's fully disclosed, but it's not a crime unless they actually sell the search engine as an unbiased tool.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Do we see a significant effect? Is it just chan (Score:5, Informative)
First off, I looked at the difference in means for Apache rankings in MSN and Google. 61.5% (MSN) vs. 64.3% (Google) for 970 observations [www.ivor.it] Right there, you ought to be able to eyeball it and see significance. But, to make sure, here are the results of a t-test which checks the likelihood that two matched sets have different means (forgive the crappy formatting):
M G
Mean 0.615061856 0.642948454
Variance 0.01100624 0.008740111
Observations 970 970
Hypothesized Mean Difference 0
df 969
t Stat -10.51551356
P(one-tail) 7.26569E-25
t Critical one-tail 1.646427658
P(two-tail) 1.45314E-24
t Critical two-tail 1.962415113
As you can see, the P is 1.45 x 10^-24, which at least makes us think the results are not pure coincidence. I don't intend on speculating on the causality, though...
Re:IIS/Apache - No diff (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Silly, silly boys (and girls) (Score:1, Informative)
configure his web server to report itself as IIS in the headers it returns. That's the only real way to know what a web server is running, unless you want to parse server-created error messages, or exploit vulnerabilities in the server itself.
This isn't true. IIS and Internet Explorer don't work according to spec. when closing down TCP connections [grotto11.com] in order to speed up subsequent connections between the two pieces of software. This can be used to differentiate between IIS and other servers.
Re:IE bias too - RTFA (Score:1, Informative)
Sweets for the sweet, lies for the liars (Score:4, Informative)
Add something like this pseudocode to your server:
if $Browser = "MSNSearchBot" then $Server = "Microsoft-IIS/6.0"
Bogus Stats (Score:1, Informative)
First, anytime you see P 10^-24 for a sample of only 1000 and means differing by 3% you should be suspicious immediately.
And 969 degrees of freedom?!
Buddy, your stats are waaaaay off. There is just 1 DF in this data.
My guess is that you tried to feed categorical data to a t-test thing and it barfed (as it should), so you fiddled with it until it claimed to produce a successful result (by somehow misinterpreting each of the 970 observations as a degree of freedom) and now you've got P 10^24, which is lunacy.
thumbs down on your methodology.
Re:Bogus Stats (Score:3, Informative)
I hadn't read his F'ing Link and thought 1000 were each individual webservers for a particular search term.
He meant 1000 different searches, which is a sensible way to do it.
His stats may be fine.
Re:IE bias too (Score:3, Informative)
He said that the distibution of servers from Google's results matched those published by Netcraft (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_sur
iTunes? Never heard of it. (Score:4, Informative)
Try typing "online music".
On Google the top two references are iTunes and iTMS. On MSN you'll have to go through a few pages before you'll see anything about iTunes.
Yeah, I trust Microsoft to provide unbiased search results. Sure I do.
m.m.
Re:IE bias too - RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
I guess the "MSN against Google" report is more attention grabbing.
Re:IIS/Apache - No diff (Score:3, Informative)
When you telnet to port 80 and type "GET
However, if you use a valid HTTP 1.0 or 1.1 request: "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: example.com\r\n\r\n" you will get all the headers.
So, I'm sorry, but your point is completely wrong. Apache sends just as many headers as IIS, as the other poster points out [slashdot.org]. You should really stop using telnet and start using curl or wget. If you do use telnet, please get a clue about how HTTP works.