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CAN WE JUST TAKE A SECOND TO MOVE OFF-TOPIC: Amongst all the ballyhoo about Microsoft launching its MSN search a few weeks back, we decided - since we're as vain as every other blog-hack in the world - just to see where No Rock came if you stuck it in the shiny new search engine. Nowhere. Although a couple of pages which linked to us did show up on the first page.
We tried again a few minutes ago - still nothing. Then, out of curiosity, we tried a couple of other blogs. They didn't show up, but, again, blogs linking to them did turn up.
The curious thing? All the missing blogs are hosted by blogspot.com - which is, of course, a Google company. Now, of course Bill Gates is welcome to choose who he does or doesn't include on his search engine - but if he is going to expressly exlcude sites operated by his rivals, he should at least have the balls to say so. Maybe something along the lines of "search the Microsoft-compliant net" or "Find whatever you need with MSNsearch - providing, of course, it's not got any connections with our rivals."
He used to be so dreamy, as well...
Or he could, of course, just include blogspot sites and stop being such a big baby about it.
google msn blogs microsoft
2 comments:
To be fair, Google does this too - "known blogs" have been penalised ever since the forest of inter-blog links started swamping the pageranks of just about every other site on the net.
MSN appears to be doing it for the same reasons, but are taking the policy further - blogs hosted by Blogger or LiveJournal and the like are marked down /much/ more heavily than those that merely feature a "powered by"-type logo.
This may well make the results, in general, more accurate (and, if it does, expect Google to follow suit).
MSN has plenty of other deficiencies, though - sites concentrating on UK / German / French content are effectively hidden from the main msn.com website; their full-text search algorithm is very ropey; and, as a result of their anti-blogger stuff, "stealth blogs" get given undue prominence - my own site is in the top 5 results on msn.co.uk for all sorts of queries that it's not remotely relevant for.
While I could understand if the idea was merely to shove blogs out the way of the "proper" searches, a cursory play-around does make it clear that they're not merely restricting blogs; lots and lots of blogs turn up in their search results; for example, if you search purely on "blogspot" you get blogspot.net at number four, which is just a shit blog service which is cybersquatting; at slot six you get a typepad blog which is dedicated to showing you how to export your blog from blogger to typepad.
And even if we do offer MSN a charitable viewpoint, and believe they're trying to keep blogs out the main search results and do everyone a favour, why on earth would they think it more useful when searching for, say "no rock and roll fun blogspot" to be given Wizbang Tech at number one and... well, I got to page seven before giving up. Surely, surely, searching on a blog name and the word "blogspot" would be an indication that, actually, the blog would be what was being looked for?
And, just to step back a little - why would excluding blogs make the searches "more accurate" anyway? Who's to say that something posted about a single on Popular would be less useful a result than an item on a static website?
More to the point, if MSN is selectively blocking huge chunks of the net, shouldn't it say so?
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