Microsoft's challenge: 90 days to beat Google | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's challenge: 90 days to beat Google

mercurynews.com

10 pointsbrg10 comments

Good to hear there's someone throwing down at least some competition.

I hope Microsoft finds/makes lots more small awesome groups to throw some money at.

Interesting read. But the negative side it was 90 days to achieve an October 21st launch of a product Google duplicated by December 7th. So 90 days to have an advantage over Google for not even 50 days. Though it is an laudable accomplishment to be ahead instead of catching up.

Ironically I had just finished publishing a blog post (http://jeffmould.blogspot.com) on why I don't think Bing is quite there yet. Their engine appears to have a bug somewhere that doesn't index sites unless you have numerous backlinks to your site. While some may not consider this a bug, it makes it difficult for the little players (myself being one) to be included in a real time search engine. Google on the other hand had indexed my blog post within 30 minutes of me posting it.

Not saying that Bing is all that great, but it might have made a difference that you are also posting on a Google owned website.

Understand that, but my other blog (http://www.jeffmould.com) has not been indexed either. Ironically, the Program Manager for Bing's Webmaster Central acknowledges there is an issue ina thread he created on their forums. He is working with site owners to get their sites in the Bing engine. From what I understand from reading his responses and looking at other threads is that Bing only naturally indexes sites that have numerous backlinks already in place. The mystery is exactly how many backlinks they are looking for before indexing the site.

To be honest, I don't understand the market behind real time search. If you are searching for something that is in the now, you'd probably want to go directly to the link and would be less likely to click an ad - far less likely than normal search, I'd think.

I also think the big hole in search is recent relevancy. Some topics are temporal, and getting results that have been time vetted, as Google does, often means the information is obsolete. For example, I just searched "CakePHP vs CodeIgniter". The first result was published in March, 2007. That's ancient!

So if the search engines can get temporal searches improved, I would be much more impressed than I am with real time search.

I used to agree with your thoughts on real-time search, but check out http://thoora.com, and it might change your mind.

They are able to grab the streams and create it into something more akin to a real-time news site, rather than just random tweets.

Thoora is impressive. I'd never seen it before. But I still have to wonder about the business side of operations, i.e., where the revenue comes from.

Thoora's model (if i've understood it correctly) is to license their tech to other news sites rather than become a source themselves. I believe that the feedback from publishers was that they could use this service to get an edge on where they should be focusing their resources, so I think there are multiple revenue streams.

They're canadian, and us canadians don't often get the word out as well as US companies, which might be why you are not familiar with them. The tech is pretty amazing though.

This article is just a bit too gushingly complimentary. PR Hit for Wagg-Ed, right?

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