

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

I am truly surprised to see 10 out of 30 stories on top page belonging to Microsoft vs Google topic.<p>Just couple of small questions: is it <i>that</i> important? how does it affect in our lives except for some tabloid-ish sensesionalist fun?
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octopus
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.

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wongjoh
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.

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va_coder
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?

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larrik
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?

~~~
va_coder
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.

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

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

