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Microsoft Claims Worlds Best Search Engine Soon

Posted by samzenpus on Thu Mar 02, 2006 08:06 AM
from the google-fight dept.
Microsoft The Internet Businesses Google
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."
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  • same trick as msn search (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pimpimpim (811140) on Thursday March 02 2006, @08:08AM (#14833871)
    maybe Vista will have a default link to this site for everything that you do in Vista, more or less like the trick in IE now where any misspelling will lead you to msn search by default. That way you'll get the "more hits than google" allright. Still won't make you a good search engine though.

    • Vista phising protection (Score:5, Interesting)

      by diegocgteleline.es (653730) on Thursday March 02 2006, @10:06AM (#14834582)
      In vista (in IE7, actually), everytime you enter a url in the browser, the browser sends the url to microsoft to know if the url is safe or not

      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.
      • In vista (in IE7, actually), everytime you enter a url in the browser, the browser sends the url to microsoft to know if the url is safe or not

        This is true but you can turn this "feature" off.

        • Re:Vista phising protection (Score:4, Insightful)

          by GoodbyeBlueSky1 (176887) <joeXbanks@@@hotmail...com> on Thursday March 02 2006, @10:34AM (#14834808)
          In vista (in IE7, actually), everytime you enter a url in the browser, the browser sends the url to microsoft to know if the url is safe or not
          This is true but you can turn this "feature" off.

          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.
        • Not only can you turn it off, but a window pops up the first time you run IE7 completely explaining the feature, what happens, and asks whether you want to turn it off or on. It isn't on by default, as you make it sound to be.

          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.

    • I'll be happy if web developers can quit wringing their hands over how to "optimize their site for Google".

      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

          • Sounds like the problem was, "google got complacent"

            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
      • I don't trust Microsoft with data of any type, regardless of how trivial it may seem. They can't seem to protect their own data (source), why would they be capable of protecting ANY data from me. They also have a financial incentive to protect there own and fail, yet there is a financial incentive to sell any information they gather from users. I'm not saying Google is the pinnacle of privacy and goodness, but they are certainly much better than MS established behavior.

        I also don't trust MS marketing B
          • This is what I don't get about MS. Every time they come out with a new OS, they block off a large segment of the market because of very high minimum requirements.

            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

            • No feature-comparable version of Linux runs on a 486 (particulary a 486 as it would have existed ca. 1994). No KDE, no GNOME, no Firefox - at least not at any sort of acceptable performance level.

              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.

              Linux doesn't offer anything over DOS...

              Quoted for hilarity. You've obviously never used a Linux command line.

  • I hope they do (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mccalli (323026) on Thursday March 02 2006, @08:10AM (#14833884) Homepage
    Honestly, I hope that they do. I find the quality of Google search results has gone down, and I would appreciate a competitor doing better and forcing Google to take a more serious look.

    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)

      by mgblst (80109) on Thursday March 02 2006, @08:17AM (#14833930) Homepage
      I would love it if Google just banned some sites from appearing on their search results, like about.com. This would improve there service.
      • Just tweak your proxy or browser's configuration to append "-inurl:about.com" to google queries.

        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.
      • That and anything with a hyphen in the name.
      • I know it's a pain, but you can add "-site:about.com" to your search query to filter out all results from them. Hell, wouldn't surprise me if there was a firefox extension that would let you add that automatically.

      • 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

  • But that sounds an awful lot like marketing speak. Until I see otherwise I'm throwing this in with the "iPod Killers."

  • Its about time. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DeadSea (69598) * on Thursday March 02 2006, @08:11AM (#14833887) Homepage Journal
    Microsoft has been showing the signs of being able to build a search engine to rival Google for some time now.
    • 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. I've been waiting for MSN to turn up the juice for a while now. I've recently been seeing some signs of it, I don't doubt there are better things to come.

    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.

  • easy... (Score:3, Funny)

    by alexmagni (190839) on Thursday March 02 2006, @08:11AM (#14833890) Homepage
    they just have to patch the new IE shipped with Vista so that it redirects everything from Google to OurNewMSN.com ... provided that they're able to ship Vista in such large numbers that this move is relevant, anyway...

  • OK, Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ursabear (818651) on Thursday March 02 2006, @08:13AM (#14833901) Homepage Journal
    So perhaps maybe Microsoft can build a search engine solution that is "better" than Google. Of course, there's no way to know until it is useable.

    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)

      by OzPeter (195038) on Thursday March 02 2006, @08:19AM (#14833936)
      AltaVista ?

      "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.
      • Yeah but Altavista never had the same mind share as Google. I never heard on a sitcom "Go search for it on AltaVista"

        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.

    • 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

  • Why do they do it? Is Microsoft THAT fucking insecure?
    • Not really. They just have a lot of shareholders that they'd like to keep happy, and talk like this generally helps to keep the stock price moving upward.

      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
  • Google's results have gotten pretty lousy in the last couple of years. Their algorithms worked great 3 years ago. People have learned how to take advantage of the algorithms, and now the results are crap. Try to search for information about something, and you'll get the top 100 matches to sites trying to sell something remotely related to it. If Microsoft can figure out a way to separate informational sites, commerce sites, and opinion sites - and allow you to get what class you want - they can beat Google,
    • If Microsoft can figure out a way to separate informational sites, commerce sites, and opinion sites - and allow you to get what class you want

      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.
  • Is this just Microsofts old tricks of anouncing lots of new products, to take hype and attention away from what is actually out there. Recently we had Origami, and now the world's best search engine.

    And why 6 months, what will they do that is so magical in 6 months?
  • I have trouble believing that MS will launch anything in 6 months, never mind on time. It would certainly be a change for them. There is only one group of people that will believe this story... the people that don't know how to use a search engine. If you already know how to use Google or Yahoo, the improvements that are talked about in the story are not needed. Using a search engine is not a black art or anything, but it does require you to be smarter than the proverbial blonde, in the same way that owning
  • * Microsoft will ship its most secure flagship Vista this year

    * 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
  • The keyword?
    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 Microsoft, maybe. However, for those who don't use Windows, and dont want the result of every query to be "Microsoft", "Alamo Car Rentals" or "Barnes and Noble" the choice will probably continue to be easy.

  • Haven't we heard this before? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by a_nonamiss (743253) on Thursday March 02 2006, @08:20AM (#14833941)
    Forgive me for sounding cynical, but we've been hearing a steady stream of these announcements for years now from multiple companies.

    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.
  • Anyone remember the "Google killer" rumors from Microsoft, and when they later unveiled [theregister.co.uk] it, it was this earth shattering masterpiece [msn.com]?

    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.
  • If this isn't vapor ware, why in G*d's name do they alert the competition of this fact? I thought the normal practice was to slam your competition suddenly and without warning, which in my book doesn't include touting future plans before you're forced to do so.
  • That is a great claim, but inquiring minds will wait and see.
    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.
  • >> Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google

    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.
  • They've claimed to have the best OS for years too, and we're still waiting for that.
  • Once again, Microsoft finds itself trying to play catch up, as the world of computing moves beyond Microsoft's desktop monopoly.
  • Holloway said that the company has no plans to integrate its search engine into Vista, the new Microsoft Windows operating system set to replace Windows XP later this year or early next year

    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
    • Why is the European president talking about taking over the American market?

      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.

    • They could make a car that ran on air and exhausted perfume and would never need maintenance or repair, and people would still rather buy a Toyota.

      That's because Toyota's don't randomly crash for no reason at all.

      (Sorry, it had to be said.)

    • See, it's one thing to say "our search technology will make incredible improvements over the current technology" and please the crowd, but something altogether different to precipitate beating Google with search technology that hasn't been seen. Microsoft is no idiot (but I'm sure someone will point out that I am wrong), so I'm sure they are on to something othewise they likely wouldn't be going public with mere delusions.

    • Re:suuuuure.... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2006, @08:23AM (#14833960)
      No, really it is true. Here is a copy of the beta code that I obtained through some shady contacts:

      <HTML>
      <HEAD>
      <TITLE>Microsoft Search Engine</TITLE>
      <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
      CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.google.com/>
      </HEAD>
      <BODY>
      Wher e do you want to go today?
      </BODY>
      </HTML>
      • Good explanation, yes.

        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).

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