Microsoft Search Changes Results for Evil Searches

Sam Or I · Post by **Sam Or I** » 2004-11-12 10:31pm

By Nick Farrell: Friday 12 November 2004, 07:25

VOLE WATCHERS are alleging that Microsoft is cooking the books when it comes to their search operations.
On this site, Jason Dowdell provides screen shots of what happens when you type in 'evil', 'more evil than God' or 'more evil than Satan' into the MSN search engine. At the top of the list is either Firefox or Google.

The same search on Google will bring you stuff about the almighty or the Prince of Darkness without mentioning browsers or even Microsoft.

Dowdell says he was a little surprised at the results as Microsoft says that it does not tamper with its search at all and gives an entirely balanced approach.

However, Dowdell said that there is evidence that Microsoft is using even more Volish behaviour to populate its search database.

He said a developer friend was watching IP 65.54.188.86, which is registered to Microsoft, scan his site. This visitor was not sending the normal header information associated with a crawler to the web server such as an http robot name or identifying info or even a browser name.

The spider was looking for pages that were not there any more, which indicates that it was checking out a database from somewhere else.

Dowdell said that in this situation the missing pages were only being found on Google, which means that the spider had got the information from Google and was checking it out. Both of them watched the new MSN search beta and in a few hours the site was updated with the page freshly installed.

His theory is that MSN is using the results from Google and possibly even Yahoo to get all of the pages they've indexed on sites that have a relatively low page count in the current msn search engine.

He said that this is the fastest way to get the relevant pages from a web site since if they went to the sites themselves they would get lots of duplicate URLs and URLs that seem different but point to the same content.

However, crawling Google's results will eliminate the bandwidth to some extent but will not completely take care of the duplicate content issue their spider will encounter, Dowdell said.

Essentially, he is claiming that the Microsoft beta uses Google as a basis for its own 'newer and better search engine'. µ

http://www.marketingshift.com/

Terr Fangbite · Post by **Terr Fangbite** » 2004-11-13 02:31am

Why does this not surprise me?

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2004-11-13 04:28am

They are seeding their search engine, how else are they going to get a large number of known sites for the initial search base.

There is nothing evil or conspiracy like about it.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2004-11-13 04:53am

French Military Victories, anyone? C'mon, this is old news.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2004-11-13 04:54am

Not "news", rather, but old stuff in general. *yawn*, in other words.

Sharp-kun · Post by **Sharp-kun** » 2004-11-13 08:24am

What is the actual problem here?

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2004-11-13 10:30am

Sharp-kun wrote:What is the actual problem here?

I think its a case of "OMG M$ is using another search engine results or dated reference materials to power their search spider"

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2004-11-13 10:38am

ggs wrote:
Sharp-kun wrote:What is the actual problem here?
I think its a case of "OMG M$ is using another search engine results or dated reference materials to power their search spider"

Or changing search results to have Google and Firefox up top when searching some stuff.

EDIT: fixed now I see.

Sharp-kun · Post by **Sharp-kun** » 2004-11-13 05:13pm

Ace Pace wrote: Or changing search results to have Google and Firefox up top when searching some stuff.

But nobody seems to care when other's do it...

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2004-11-13 06:08pm

I'm surprised that the Mozilla Firefox page turns up in the first page of results when I searched for "Internet Explorer"...