Microsoft To Launch Homegrown Search Engine

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?"

Search engine wars

[dauthur]

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.

Do they have to ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they have to try and push themselves on to every possible market available, why not jsut stick to doing what they already do and trying to make that work correctly before continuing to try and monopolise every avenue of computing that they can think of?

Re:So

[Draveed]

You would be amazed. This week I discovered someone in my office who knew nothing about google.

Maybe..

[StormyWeather]

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.

Similarities

[ArbiterOne]

Check out the similarities:
http://search.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]
http://search.msn.com/ [msn.com]
http://www.google.com/ [google.com]

Re:So

[Technician]

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.

wtf?

[Mr_Silver]

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.

3 bad results.

[caluml]

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?

Country-specific redirection borked

[OblongPlatypus]

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.

Re:Do they have to ?

[ssj_195]

Yes, this is fully in accordance with Microsoft's mindset - whenever a new pie appears in the horizon (a floating pie lol wtf?!) Microsoft cannot stand not having a piece of it. To be honest, I think the fact that they cannot have all of it rankles them. I hate to sound like a typical anti-M$ "slashbot", but whenever I think of adjectives for Microsoft's whole corporate mindset, the only ones I can think of are "broken" and "diseased".

Filtering out queries

[ttys00]

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.

MSN Bombs

[Nuskrad]

My three [msn.com] favourite [msn.com] googlebombs [msn.com] still work! Also interesting are Best operating system [msn.com] and Worst operating System [msn.com]

Re:About time

[FireFury03]

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.. :(

Netcraft says the hosting servers run on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=search.m sn.com

No faith in their own product

[BlackHawk-666]

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

It's hardly brilliant...

[nick8325]

Search for 'Search' on Google:
search.com
AltaVista
Yahoo
Excite
All TheWeb
Lycos ...

Search for 'Search' on new MSN:
Vault: the most trusted name in career information
Destiny Group
CareerBuilder
Realtor.com
Lycos People Search

So, the fifth link on MSN is nearly - but not quite - relevant.

Incidentally, Google doesn't list itself until 20th when you search for "search" on it. Which is interesting... maybe it's because of its minimalistic website which doesn't mention searching very much.

Re:Best search engine

[jimicus]

That looks remarkably like a Google results page, in terms of structure rather than content.

Example:

http://www.search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=SRCHWB &q=best%20search%20engine [msn.com]
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q =best+search+engine&btnG=Google+Search [google.com]

Surely Microsoft haven't chosen to rip-off their design based on the market leader?

Re:Even worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Creating a new service that allows people to ____

Ohh, lets see if I can get this right:

"Creating a new service that allows people to leverage synergies in a competetive market place while at the same time maintaining focus of core issues and high revenue development streams"

What do I win?!?

no NEAR operator

[Sai Babu]

When will these guys take a cue from altavista.com and incorporate the NEAR operator. For example Pussy NEAR cat returns a much higher density of feline related URLs.

More tinfoil hat fodder.

[saur2004]

Anyone remember what the infamous Registration Wizard did when upgrading from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95?

I wouldnt put it past them to code a phone home feature for clickthroughs for this.

Even if they get caught doing it, I can just hear the argument now, "Heck Yahoo, AltaVista and others collect aggregate data. Just look at what the URL becomes when you mouse over the link from thier lists."

I for one, love that google STILL does not do that.

Re:So

[Anonymous Coward]

He's moved on to the infamous step 3.

PROFIT!

congrats, I'd mod you, but I don't have any mod points.

Seriously, who doesn't use google to search for a microsoft error message instead of microsoft's knowledgebase search.

And, what does everybody think about them being able to retrieve hits at pay for registration sites like experts-exchange?

Re:So

[Spoing]

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.

The only difference between then and now is that it used to be that if the search came up empty, I would tell them to write up a note on what they learn so that the next person searching would find something. Now, with Google, that is rarely necessary.