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Microsoft To Launch Homegrown Search Engine

Posted by timothy on Wed Nov 10, 2004 06:50 AM
from the humboldt-county dept.
Microsoft Businesses Google The Internet
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "While Google is currently the king-of-the-hill in search engines, Microsoft continues to lag in market share and uses Yahoo's technology/results. But Cnet reports that they'll launch on Thursday their own homegrown search engine , although it appears this is mostly a face-lift (despite a year of development and $100 million investment). According to Bill Gates, they 'will introduce a homegrown web crawler and algorithmic search engine ... later this year,' which is almost certainly their tech preview (you can look at this now) -- but will that be ready for prime-time in less than two months?"
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  • About time (Score:4, Funny)

    by lightdarkness (791960) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:52AM (#10775167) Homepage Journal
    I've seen their cralwer (their new one I presume) around for at least a month, without any indication on where the results were being shown. At least I have another spider to add to my list of robots that steal my bandwidth.
    • Is this [slashdot.org] their crawler?

    • Re:About time (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FireFury03 (653718) <slashdot@nexusDALIuk.org minus painter> on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:37AM (#10775341) Homepage
      The msnbot has been around for many months. I have seen many complaints about the amount of bandwidth it uses and I know many web masters (me included) have blocked it's access because of this so I dunno how useful the search results will be. I've seen reports of it sucking gigabytes off a site in a day, and then doing exactly the same again the next day, which is really quite serious for those people who have a reasonably small bandwidth limit on their web space.

      For me it was sucking several gig a month off my site, and was obviously very badly coded since it was refetching the same pages over and over (cachable pages, non-cachable pages and 404's). So in the end I gave up and outright blocked the damned thing - yet another bit of shoddy MS code out to break the internet.. :(

  • So (Score:4, Funny)

    by jbartone (612450) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:52AM (#10775168)
    Who's actually going to use this instead of Google?

    • Re:So (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MoonFog (586818) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:54AM (#10775173)
      Since it'll probably end up being default start-up page in IE, lots.

      • Re:So (Score:5, Funny)

        by zakezuke (229119) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:00AM (#10775206)
        Since it'll probably end up being default start-up page in IE, lots.

        Fortunately IE has enough in the way of exploits so the default start-up page gets hijacked often enough.

      • Re:So (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Technician (215283) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:04AM (#10775234)
        Since it'll probably end up being default start-up page in IE, lots.

        You mean the same people who use the default favorites? I looked at the default list once, then deleted it. It looked like a paid list from the yellow pages of the travel and media sections in the phone book.

    • Re:So (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Draveed (664730) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:56AM (#10775192)
      You would be amazed. This week I discovered someone in my office who knew nothing about google.

      • Re:So (Score:5, Funny)

        by Titusdot Groan (468949) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:30AM (#10775323) Journal
        Did your company fire them?

        I've got a running gag with my team that if I can find the answer to their problem in 3 google searches I get their pay for that week. The number of dumb question I get is WAY down.

        • Re:So (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Spoing (152917)
          1. I've got a running gag with my team that if I can find the answer to their problem in 3 google searches I get their pay for that week. The number of dumb question I get is WAY down.

          Smart. Back when I worked as a Tech Support manager (pre-WWW, post 'net), the techs would constantly come to me with the same questions... I'd fire back to them "did you find anything in IZE?" (a simple but useful outline database back then). If they said no, I'd look...and about 1/3 of the time found the answer there.

          Th

      • This week I discovered someone in my office who knew nothing about google.

        What's google?
      • >You would be amazed. This week I discovered someone in my office who knew nothing about google.

        i imagine you had to use google to find such a rare person? :P

  • Search for Windows..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by alistair (31390) <alistairNO@SPAMhotldap.com> on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:54AM (#10775172)
    No Results Found

    Needs some fine tuning before it's ready for the prime time, me thinks.

  • Microsoft's problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ArbiterOne (715233) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:54AM (#10775174) Homepage
    Microsoft is branching out too much. Without ripping off Google, I don't really see how they can pull this off. In order to reverse the current trend in market share, they'd have to have a better algorithm than Google, a massive ad campaign, and the popular opinion on their side. Oh, and start giving things away for free (Google: Blogger, Picasa, etc.)
    • It's not a "rip off" when multiple companies offer similar products, it is competition. Competition is a good thing: it lowers prices and improves products. And while Google has some good technology, they company didn't come into being in a vacuum and they don't own the idea of citation and reference analysis, either legally or scientifically.

      "Lower what prices?" you might ask. Well, Google isn't a charity. I expect Microsoft will compete with them on advertising rates and whereever else Google makes mo

        • Re:Microsoft's problem (Score:4, Insightful)

          by irc.goatse.cx troll (593289) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @08:14AM (#10775519) Journal
          Yeah! And whats with AOL using AIM as the default messaging service? And aol's mail for the default email? Its so monopolistic! They should license YIM and embed it into aol to be fair to their competition.

          Seriously, its their browser, why shouldnt they make the homepage their search? Moz's default is a moz branded google, how is this different?
          • AOL doesn't have almost 100% market share.
            it is illegal by law to use a monopoly position as an advantage in the market (and for good reason). Google doesn't rely on preinstalled search software, why on earth should MS have to make it the default to get cusotmers?

            love your name btw.
      • Microsoft may have won the browser war against netscape, but netscape lost it. Had netscape not put out such crappy products in the 4.x timeframe, they wouldn't have dropped below the 20 percent marketshare treshold, and people would have designed sites to work in both.

        For microsoft to win the search engine war, google would have to lose it, and that's not very likely.
  • "mozilla firefox" download
    google

  • Algorithmic search engine? WTF? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jagripino (314506) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:54AM (#10775179)
    Don't *all* search engines have to have, hmm, some kind of algorithm in them?

    Marketing speak confuses me! Please stop!

  • this article is oooooold (Score:5, Informative)

    by evil_one666 (664331) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:55AM (#10775181)
    This article is from june 30th
  • Seems a little bit slow to me. Maybe due to being ./ed....

  • Competition is good.... I think (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cloudkj (685320) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:55AM (#10775186)
    What with all the different search engines out there trying to compete with Google, more companies like Microsoft and Amazon (a9.com) are coming out with their own "innovative" search engines. Seems like they all just want to take a tiny bite out of Google's big pie... I do have to admit a9.com looks pretty cool :)

  • Doubtful this will take any ground. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ambient_Developer (825456) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:55AM (#10775187) Journal
    I say it time and time again.. Microsoft is not a company of innovation (besides user interfaces), they are a company that aquires other companies. It is doubtful that a home-grown engine will beat the likes of google.. Especially being so late in the game, not only that what good will a face lift do? Google is already one of the easiest things out there, how can Microsoft make search even easier? THAT is the 100 million dollar question!

  • Tech Preview? (Score:3, Funny)

    by beders (245558) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:55AM (#10775188) Homepage
    No results for my name or a random word. More worryingly no result for "porn". Got a long way to go chaps, $100 million seems a little steep for a input box linked to an error page...
  • It seems that Microsoft might just be trying to cut in on the business that Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves and all those other engines are making. I don't know what kind of a fool would use a Microsoft search engine anyways, the index would have to be built from scratch, instead of the years of data that Google and Yahoo have accrued.

  • Dutch? (Score:3, Funny)

    by tompercival (318073) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @06:56AM (#10775191)
    Fantastic... dutch search results - just what I was after too.
  • their 100m would have been better spent to stop the bleeding they are about to recieve at the hands of Mozilla before folks realize they can add specialized search engines in the search toolbar instead of just google. Once folks find out how wonderful this ability is I think it will even slap Google upside the head a bit. For real research I have found this an invaluable as using google tends to give me search results that are too broad, often from sources that are more difficult to document.
  • Talk about search biasing: Results 1-15 of about 17513887 containing "linux"
    Results 1-15 of about 31192494 containing "windows"
    Results 1-15 of about 25424770 containing "microsoft"
    Results 1-15 of about 6769904 containing "unix"

  • The best part of all... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    is that when I searched for "Windows XP crack" it found a great page about an underground piracy ring called the SPA, they even gave me a number to call 1-800-388-PIR8. Thanks Microsoft!

  • Similarities (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ArbiterOne (715233) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:02AM (#10775217) Homepage
    Check out the similarities:
    http://search.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]
    http://search.msn.com/ [msn.com]
    http://www.google.com/ [google.com]

  • Best search engine (Score:5, Funny)

    by Libor Vanek (248963) <<libor.vanek> <at> <gmail.com>> on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:02AM (#10775219) Homepage
    Just try to search "best search engine" and enjoy what comes out:
    http://www.search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=SRCHWB &q=best%20search%20engine [msn.com]

  • lack of trust (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vinsci (537958) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:03AM (#10775222)
    Microsofts search engine lacks the most important feature: trusted results.

    In the past, it has been shown that Microsoft blocks search results that are contrary to its own business interests.

  • I searched for 'html' in their "preview" search engine and the w3c page for HTML was nowhere in the first 20 results. I didn't look beyond 20 results. The w3c page should have been in at least the first 20 results. Is this search engine really that good?
  • ... after getting enough users from directing all windows searches to their engine, they will create "search extensions" for all the sites hosted in a Microsoft server, and "special html/jsp search tags" for sites developed using their tools, which will produce a better placement on their search results.

  • wtf? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mr_Silver (213637) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:08AM (#10775245)
    although it appears this is mostly a face-lift (despite a year of development and $100 million investment)

    I thought it was only marketing that didn't understand that just because it looks the same, doesn't necessarily mean you've done nothing under the hood.

  • THE bot? (Score:5, Informative)

    by knipknap (769880) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:08AM (#10775246) Homepage
    I wonder whether that's the bot that has been scanning my website for three days by attempting to "crawl" through all session ids and causing more then 1 GByte of traffic.

    "msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

    It was only stoppable by blocking the IP. (robots.txt was only read once before it started) Great, smart bot, really.

  • 3 bad results. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by caluml (551744) <slashdot&spamgoeshere,calum,org> on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:12AM (#10775260) Homepage
    Orange. No results for Orange, the mobile phone company.
    Linux. No pointers to linux.org.
    Google. Returns the Dutch/Belgian version of the page. Why?

    • Re:3 bad results. (Score:4, Informative)

      by BuilderBob (661749) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @08:11AM (#10775494)
      Orange. No results for Orange, the mobile phone company.
      Linux. No pointers to linux.org.
      Google. Returns the Dutch/Belgian version of the page. Why?

      These are no longer true. I know it used to do this but now ...

      'Orange' returns Orange.co.uk.
      'Linux' returns linux.org
      'google' returns google.com
      'microsoft sucks' returns fuckmicrosoft.com
      'abu graib' returns the photographs of inside the prison.
      'lindows' returns lindows.com

      This is from Firefox 0.8 on Redhat Linux.

      BB

  • Country-specific redirection borked (Score:3, Interesting)

    by OblongPlatypus (233746) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:15AM (#10775272)
    Clicking on the tech preview link in the blurb redirects me to a French version of the page, at techpreview.search.msn.fr. The problem, you ask? I'm in Spain.

    Minor detail, sure, but add it to the shaky performance of the actual search, and this product would seem to require more than a couple of months of fine-tuning.

  • Filtering out queries (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ttys00 (235472) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:21AM (#10775285)
    Will they be filtering out queries with this engine as well (eg. xfree86 being filtered as discussed here a while back)?

    Of course. And while they do that, I won't be using it.

  • Search Results (Score:5, Funny)

    by chia_monkey (593501) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @07:45AM (#10775375) Journal
    Oh my. I can just see the search results now:

    Search entry: "Antarctic Penguin"

    Search Result: A paperclip pops up on your screen and says "It appears you are searching for a penguin. Did you know Microsoft servers are cheaper to run than Linux? Would you like to buy one now?"

  • No faith in their own product (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BlackHawk-666 (560896) <ivan.hawkes@mac.com> on Wednesday November 10 2004, @08:02AM (#10775459) Homepage
    I notice they're using Akamai instead of a cluster of cheap Windows servers. Nice of them to recommend to everyone else to use their technology, but then not trust it for their own stuff.
    subversion:~# telnet techpreview.search.msn.com 80
    Trying 213.253.9.73...
    Connected to a213-253-9-73.deploy.akamaitechnologies.net.
    Esca pe character is '^]'.
    HEAD /

    HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request
    Server: AkamaiGHost
    Mime-Version: 1.0
    Content-Type: text/html
    Content-Length: 161
    Expires: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 12:56:31 GMT
    Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 12:56:31 GMT
    Connection: close

  • Nice and clean (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jmcmunn (307798) on Wednesday November 10 2004, @08:06AM (#10775477)

    I can't say that this will be my first stop when searching (Google will be until they stop being the best) but often times, if my result is not in the first few pages of Google, rather than figure out the exact phrase I need to search for to find the site I am looking for, I just hit a few other engines to see if my original phrase does the trick.

    I can see how this new MS search page would become stop number 2, in front of Yahoo as long as they keep it clean and light like Google is. Then I'll move along to Yahoo of Lycos or wherever.

    So yeah, I think this is a good improvement for my general searching needs, but it is going to take something amazing to replace Google as my number one choice. It's sort of a brand loyalty at this point.

  • haha (Score:3, Funny)

    by deander2 (26173) * <public.kered@org> on Wednesday November 10 2004, @09:15AM (#10776019) Homepage
    at the bottom of my search:

    "Results 1 - 10 of about 8 containing deander2"

    first off: "about 8"?!?
    second, WTF? can't they check for 10 results?

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