… and Google’s gonna win!
Microsoft has launched a new beta version of its MSN search engine, which it claims offers more features than other search engines. They’re lying!
Microsoft said in its launch statement that its search engine returned results from five billion web pages – more than any other search engine. Almost immediately, Google updated its front page with a link to the GoogleBlog, where it says that its search index has nearly doubled to “more than 8 billion pages”.
According to an article on BBC News:
Results returned by the MSN search engine will be arranged according to categories. Users will be able to flip between different results, such as web, news and images, by clicking on tabs. Also on hand will be menus to help refine searches according to countries or languages. Microsoft will also include what it has dubbed “graphic equalisers” that let people emphasise different characteristics of results such as ones that are more popular or more recent. The search site will also return canned results for discrete queries such as capital cities and other well known facts plus definitions, calculations, conversions and solutions to equations. Ask Jeeves has been offering similar services for some time.
If Microsoft seriously thinks it’s going to overtake Google, it has a long way to go – 82 million people per month use Google. In its recent results, Google revealed that profits and sales more than doubled in its third quarter. Also, people trust Google, whereas the Microsoft corporate megolith has long been an object of distrust and even hate across the Internet. I know who I’ll be sticking with…!