Microsoft's Google-killer arrives with a 'whuh?' (New search engine starting with a whimper)

The Register (U.K.) ^ | November 12, 2004 | Andrew Orlowski

[ChiefKujo]

If you want to see the difference, type road king classic into the image engine of both. MSN retrieves 84 images. Google retrieves 484 images.

[ArcadeQuarters]

Between those 3 - 5 second hits, it may have downloaded 1000 or more pages from other sites. A well-written spider won't slam an individual site with all the hits at once.

[night reader]

Took a quick look and didn't find a much-used feature of Google Advanced... "without the words."

Am I missing something?

[TomGuy]

Search engines are good about 'current' pages. But none that I've seen allow searching older files. I'd like an option, for example, to search only web pages that were online between, say, June 1998 and February 2000.

Sometimes I want old info, but most search engines can't search that way. They assume people want newer info only.

[TomGuy]

Does look a little weak now, compared with Google...but so did IE2.0

I remember loading Windows 1.5 on a pc around 1988. I thought, ok, fine, but what does it do? It didn't do much of anything, except list some files on the hard drive. It wasn't until version 3.0 (c. 1991) that it 'did' anything useful--allowing several programs to run in 'boxes' on the screen. That became useful because I did desktop publishing and sometimes needed a graphic editor and DTP and wordprocessor opened.

[arthurus]

centralized bargaining power against large pharmaceutical companies is a great way of reducing the cost of drugs used by the population, so one day, governments will realize that collective social bargaining with copyright owners

And will have the same effects of suppressing quality and invention.

[chilepepper]

the technical gurus of google (some of whom i've actually worked with;) have done one thing which to me makes them forever more important than any other search system: they grabbed the original internet newsgroup database from dejanews and have protected and made it available on line.

this is a huge thing, and forgive me for sounding silly, a great service to mankind.

without them, the news posting from 20 years ago would not be on line (i like to read my old postings from time to time), and solving IT problems would be much more difficult...

[RightInEastLansing]

Interesting. I sell high performance auto parts on the web, and my ebay store came up first when I searched for the most popular mustang exhaust system (Borla 140067) on MSN. I am nowhere to be found with a google search.

Sorry, it is probably only interesting to me.

[SamAdams76]

Well I like it. I have made it my default search engine. Go Microsoft! Can't wait until they make a cheap version of Apple's iPod. It's coming! Believe me, it is coming. And within two years, the Microsoft version will be outselling the Apple version by a 10-1 margin.

[Salamander]

Google does a lot of funny stuff;

http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html

[John Lenin]

I'm glad I switched to Linux. None of the google goodies are ported to Linux, yet.