Ask HN: why is MS vs Google war so important to us hackers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: why is MS vs Google war so important to us hackers?

I am truly surprised to see 10 out of 30 stories on top page belonging to Microsoft vs Google topic.

Just couple of small questions: is it that important? how does it affect in our lives except for some tabloid-ish sensesionalist fun?

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Competition between these two is important for everyone wants high quality search services. If you have more players they will compete each other by improving their services. A single huge search engine is unhealthy for everyone and on the long term you will notice a decline in quality and this will affect the quality of your online life.

So it is a good thing that today Google has a serious competition.

I don't think Google or anyone here is arguing about competition. The key issue is that MSFT seems to be stealing search results off from Google. That's like Gartner publishing and selling material with sections taken from research from Juniper, etc.

I find it interesting that Google and Facebook got their start by getting data from other sites and then presenting it in a new way. Search engines and social networks don't start from nothing. Now that other people are grabbing their data to present it in new ways (like they once did or still do) what will be their response?

Is this true? I never heard of Facebook being seeded with other site's data.

I also don't see how Google could have even made use of a raw dump of any other site's data at the time. They would need to crawl the sites anyway to fill out their PageRank data. Do you have a citation that says differently?

As far as facebook: No one would have heard of facebook if not for facemash

As far as Google: One person's raw dump of data is someone else's valueable copyrighted material.

I could argue grabbing Google "raw dump" of bytes and presenting it my way is unique and original. It's not black and white as you seem to think.

They have a huge influence in the world of tech and it's the hot topic of the day.

Google Search is the bulk of Google's revenue and power. The idea that Microsoft may be "stealing" it IS a Big Deal.

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