MSN Does Not Steal Google Results to Seed New Index
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MSN Does Not Steal Google Results to Seed New Index  Rumorville, conspiracy theory, and over speculation results in crazed forum discussion and a possible slashdot mentioning. Jason Dowdell, someone I have spoken with often for about a year now, published a blog entry named Microsoft Crawling Google Results For New Search ...
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Microsoft to launch RSS aggregator  MSN is expected to begin quietly testing RSS aggregation and blog search Tuesday evening US Pacific Time.   Reports indicate that the new service has been developed in partnership with Moreover Technologies, a will include aggregation and search to MyMSN.  âRSS is getting a lot of traction and ...
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With the announcement of its new search engine, Microsoft is all geared to spoil the search engine party of Google and Yahoo. The software giant today released a beta version of its new MSN search service, claiming
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New MSN Search May Be a Google Killer!  The Second Look at MSN's Search technology is available for public beta testing. I've given it a spin myself and must say that I'm impressed. Although they have no ads on the SERP's of the preview site, I'm sure they will load it ...
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Tomorrow, Microsoft finally releases the beta version of its proprietary search engine. For over a year, webmasters and SEOs have seen evidence of MSNbot spidering their sites as MSN-Search gathered information and compiled its database.
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Europe's latest shot across Microsoft's bow shouldn't faze investors.
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I&#8217;m playing the devil&#8217;s advocate here, so keep that in mind in case I end up trampling all over anything you hold dear :) Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years - it&#8217;s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.  Apart from Blogger spam [...]
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MSN Search has a few features that go beyond Google, but it&#39;s generally disappointing. Granted, the new MSN search is still in the &quot;beta&quot; phase, and Microsoft is expected to make the technology part of its main MSN site early next year.
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Popular British scientific magazine New Scientist has given Microsoftâs new MSN search engine, still in very early beta, good grades.
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The Google vs. Microsoft technology war does not seem to let up. The latest salvo from the MSN camp is a beta edition of its new MSN Desktop Search application.
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MSN Search Engine Launch December 2004  MSN Search Launch December '04? Wouldn't it be a kick, if they stick to effective algorithms and the slick look they're offering in the October tech preview incarnation! That version has me very happy with the rankings of my own sites and those of clients ...
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Okay, I'm not seriously suggesting Microsoft is paying off Netcraft to produce positive survey results (although this is certainly a standard operating procedure for Microsoft). But something is odd, if not rotten, in the state of Netcraft.  I have often cited Netcraft web server surveys as evidence that open source beats closed source. The Netcraft surveys almost always showed Apache leading Microsoft IIS by a wide margin, and showed Apache growing as Microsoft IIS market share was shrinking.  Lately, however, Netcraft began to claim that Apache market share has been shrinking rapidly while Microsoft IIS has been gaining the market share lost by Apache. Netcraft even proposed that, "Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position."  Microsoft IIS may displace Apache as the most-used web server?  Could this really be true, or is this reporting from the Bizarro world?  And does anyone else find the wording rather odd?  "Windows" may challenge Apache?  Huh? read more
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Google is Mozilla's sugar daddy.  Is this cause for alarm?
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According to this new post on the PHP Security Blog, there's a new META tag the Suhosin extension includes in the output of a phpinfo page to help resolve some of the issues with Google (and buddies) storing the contents of the page, giving a potential attacker information they could exploit.   [The] extra META TAG to the HTML output of phpinfo() that forbids indexing and archiving by robots. For fairness reasons following the embedded links is still allowed to robots, because a lot of projects [...] to get at least a few backlinks for their work, that might result in a better search engine positioning.   The patch can be downloaded from their site.
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Coinciding with the preview of Microsoft's new MSN Search, Google has announced its search index has nearly doubled to a massive 8 billion documents. The company says users will now find more results on obscure topics that previously returned just a handful of Web pages. The new index places Google's search scope far beyond its rivals, but as Google V.P. of Engineering Bill Coughran notes, "The real test is how well we do in finding what you want from within those pages. We'll keep improving that too."
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft thinks its Live Search can match GoogleÂ in some areas now, but the company has been theÂ underdog in searchÂ for so long it's not even trying to lure users away from its rival -- at least not yet. Showing off a dizzying array of tools to reporters and analysts at its Silicon Valley campus in Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., Microsoft executives said several times that the company is focused on providing a better search experience for current users of Live Search, hoping toÂ get them to search there more often. The Redmond, Wash., company also wants to lure users of its MSN portal to more frequently use Live Search. They compared Live Search's results to those of Google in some cases and said customer research showed its user satisfaction catching up to Google, but didn't talk about grabbing market share. The numbers are damning: About 37 percent of Web searchers sometimes use Live Search, but only about 11 percent of all searches are done on the site, Microsoft said, citing independent statistics. The average user of Live Search does 15 searches on the site per month, while the comparable number for Google is 55. Microsoft runs behind YahooÂ and Google, and Derrick Connell, a general manager in product management at Microsoft, acknowledged that the search product was actually losing market share in the first four months of this year. But the company hopes to gain ground at least among its current base with the new capabilities. Over the past three years, Microsoft has quietly invested in basic things such as coverage, expanding its index to more than 20 billion Web documents, executives said. But it's more flashy additions in video, health, local search and maps that may help Live Search make an impression. The new video search interface, one of the features to be rolled out gradually to all visitors over the next week, lets users play a preview of each video on a results page just by putting the cursor over the image representing it. Using internally developed technology as it "crawls" a video Web site, Microsoft detects moments in a video that are likely to be highlights, said Mike Nichols, a group program manager in Live Search. Those parts are combined in a 30-second preview that searchers can watch to get an idea of what a longer video is like. Audio peaks, flashes of light and scene changes are among the elements Microsoft's automated system looks for. The previews are cached on Microsoft's own servers for quick playing, he said. Microsoft's new specialized health search engine, to be rolled out the following week, will divide results into separate columns for journal articles, Web results and sponsored results. To address consumer worries about privacy, all searches and results on the health site will be encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). In local search, Microsoft is using its Virtual Earth tool for richer results. It can project aerial photographs of places on Virtual Earth's navigable three-dimensional maps of major cities, said General Manager Erik Jorgensen. A tool for users to show highlights of a trip, called Collections, will be enhanced so viewers can just click through the trips or passively watch them in a virtual video rather than looking around a map. The maker of a Collection will also be able to upload the virtual video to sites such as YouTube, he said. Local directions will also be enhanced. Rather than make users enter a starting point, Live Search will offer directions from all the major highways, from which users can choose. As an option, the local search engine will also be able to modify those directions in light of current traffic conditions. Local and mapping features will be rolled out by mid-October, according to the company. Microsoft has done a poor job selling its search offerings, and if it has matched Google on factors such as relevance, few people would believe that right now, said Gartner Inc. analyst Van Baker. The new video, health and local search features are impressive and Microsoft is doing the right thing by targeting current Live Search users and MSN portal visitors, he said. "They've got to make sure that [group] is happy first," Baker said. After that, it may be able to convince others that Live Search is worth a try.
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Granted, the new MSN (http://beta.search.msn.com) is still in the &quot;beta&quot; phase -- testing a work in progress. Microsoft is expected to make the technology part of its main MSN site early next year.