Microsoft Testing Rival to Google's Start Page

aer0 writes "It looks like Microsoft has quietly put up their version of Google's start page. It's interesting in several ways. First, the layout and use of javascript is strikingly similar to Google's. Second, one of the few major differences is that there is no MS equivalent banner or other flashing indication that it is an MS site."

oooops

[yagu]

for me, the last line on the page:

©2005 Microsoft &nbsp

kind of says it all... In their hurry to rip off the competition, they even forgot a semicolon... Tsk-tsk!

Re:Research

[doubleyewdee]

Correct. I've only been working here (MSN Search Ops) for about three months, but start.com was old news when I got here. It appears to have been in the sandbox for quite a long time. In general Slashdot form it's assumed that this is a copy of Google's thing, but I think they're both copies of Yahoo's thing this time. :) Still, start.com is fun to play with. It makes for a nice homepage.

Re:oooops

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans need to stop equating wealth with creativity. Wealth merely indicates wealth; not creativity, not fortitude, not tenacity. Microsoft is a mature company in a sector that abhors maturity (meaning lack of evolution or energetic change.) They are, and will continue, merely to circle the wagons and hope the stockholders don't realize that they are bereft of ideas. Ignorant stock analysts, who have loaded up their clients' portfolios with Mircosoft as a "growth" stock will, to save their necks and avoid charges of malfeasance, continue to aid and abet Microsoft in this charade. The short of it is this: Of course Microsoft copied, the only thing worse than this "Technology Leader" copying is how people take the revalation to be newsworthy. You have a life to live; get on with it.

Re:Wow

[toopc]

On the other hand...

GOOG +7.58

MSFT +0.89 ...is kind of amusing.

That's amusing only if you don't understand percentages. Look at a 1 year chart, that's amusing.

Doing better

[Slinky Saves the Wor]

Their Javascript is broken, at least so says Konqueror.

Error:
  http://www.start.com/extern/wsfw/compat/0.072605.0 /msncompat.js [start.com]:
  SyntaxError: Parse error at line 85

Error:
  http://www.start.com/extern/wsfw/core/0.072605.1/m sncore.js [start.com]:
  TypeError: Value undefined (result of expression window.attachEvent) is not an object. Cannot be called.

Error: http://www.start.com/3/ [start.com]: TypeError:
  Undefined value

I'm one of the start.com folks...

[steverman]

(I posted this as a new topic earlier. I hope I don't end up in karma hell for re-posting it as a reply like I should have...)

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
- March 6th, http://start.com/1 [start.com]
- April 6th, http://start.com/2 [start.com]
- May 20th(?), google's personalized page
- June 6th, http://start.com/3 [start.com]

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9 [msdn.com]. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 [start.com] to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want peo