Saturday, November 13, 2004 - Posts

Microsoft's Search Technology (The Register's Conclusion)

Interesting Article from the Register about the new search engine Microsoft have been developing. Probably the first i've seen that doesnt seem to be bashing a MS Product down and beating it to death.... Conclusion: It may actually survive!

Google's executives might be sleeping a little easier this weekend after Microsoft unveiled its much-hyped new search engine. It's fast, slick, and comes with a raft of interesting new features: confounding some expectations as surely as it confirms others. In short, Microsoft has produced a search engine that's better in almost every way than Google, except for one: its search results are terrible. But let's start with the good stuff.

For the past week or so I've been using the (still indexing) search engine to try out the new engine, whilst the format of the results is somewhat dodgy (come on...) it's fast (wait till theres as much traffic as google has to decide on this) and seems to find more pages than google. However, it seems there are some potential flaws one i noticed was....

Take for Instance our editor, HotHTML 3. On Google, the home page to the product is at the top with approximately 9,600 results when we serach for “HotHTML 3”. (LINK) Which i presume is the proper way as the most relavent would be the source of hte product.

The same query on MS's Beta engine churns out approximately 2,200 results with VBWire at the top of the list. Relavancy isnt being done properly I presume (or is it?) or maybe its doing the newer pages first.(LINK)

Take a look at teh Search Builder tool which is quite useful to write a complex query easily... all this powered by the ASP.NET foundation... WOW!

Another day another lawsuit... Novel and WordPerfect

Novell filed suit against Microsoft on Friday, claiming the company used anti-competitive tactics in the desktop software market during the 1990s.

Why do people immediately think that if their software looses the market to a competitor and that competitor turns out to be Microsoft that its their fault? (Netscape anyone?)Well Novel seems to think so. Those who know about WordPerfect would recall that it took them so long to port the 16bit version to the 32bit world when Microsoft came out with their 32bit flavours. Does that have any relavency to the fact that they “could” have made a grave mistake by continuing to support Win3x when they should have looked at 9x/NT sooner rather than later? I used WP back in 3.xx days(yes i was young but I still used it).

Novell also contends that Microsoft deliberately excluded WordPerfect from the marketplace. Novell said Microsoft used its monopoly power to prevent hardware manufacturers from offering WordPerfect to customers.

Hmmm... the world is full of people that like to eat their own shit. You made a mistake, admit it and get over it. Everyone wants a piece of Microsoft (or atleast to be as profitable or as big as the MS Empire is) and for some companies, it seems suing them is the only way they get there. Booo i say boo!

Read More Here.

On a side note, I wonder if Microsoft can sue Apple if (or have they) included Safari in their upcoming Tiger release of their OS? Maybe I can sue MS for including Notepad (like many other text-editor software developers out there) for making it anti-competitive for us...