

Microsoft's challenge: 90 days to beat Google - brg
http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_14242473

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s3graham
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.

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jmount
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.

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jeffmould
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.

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jojopotato
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.

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jeffmould
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.

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nhebb
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.

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pedalpete
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.

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nhebb
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.

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pedalpete
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.

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

