Colm Smyth's Weblog

Microsoft seeks to out-search Google

Microsoft puts its dukes up to the practically omniscient Google with it's new search engine out to beta. Competition is good for us web seekers, but if you are a heavy search engine user, you can use searchenginewatch to keep a balanced view of the internet. Alternatively, you could try the charmingly named Dogpile meta-engine to look for some new search engines. But my favourite "meta" method for finding search engines to date has to be the Google Labs 'Sets' feature with search criteria like "google" and "lycos"!

What can we expect next from search engines? I think the 'Sets' approach has huge potential (especially if it's backed by a semantic network with weighted nodes, optionally cross-referenced with significant terms from the Glossary), but I'm also betting on: grammar correction, federated travel search, dynamic directory (get a yahoo style tree, but based on a semantic analysis of the search terms), RSS meta-search, ... but that's enough for one blogity.

Steve Ballmer looks ready to go for Google

(2004-11-12 13:06:09.0) Permalink

Firefox seems to be unpopular with Microsoft

Microsoft's Office templates web-site appears to be a great resource for users of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org; as far as I can see (but I'm not a lawyer), you have the right to use the templates there, you just can't re-distribute them for profit (I found no special legal verbage to distinguish the rights of a Microsoft Office user versus that of other office suites).

But what I really wanted to share with you was a rather odd thing that happened when I was browsing some of the folders over lunch, looking for some inspiration for a template I wanted to create. Clicking through the folders, I opened the Marketing Materials folder of the Templates site.

Now for the strange bit... I happened to browse this section with Mozilla and then shortly after view it with Firefox, my everyday browser. if you view this page with Firefox you only see 1 template (one for your word-processor called "Request for permission to reprint article"). If you view the same page with Mozilla, you see 12 templates. Maybe some of you would like to try this in Internet Explorer.

I hope this is just a bug in the microsoft.com web-site; I would hate to think that someone there doesn't like Firefox ;)

Update: Some comments pointed out that other browsers seem to be broken, such as Konqueror. Just to try to get to the bottom of this, I tried some other browsers:

IE 6.028 shows all 12 templates (yay)
Netscape 7.2 does not show any warning on the page, but like Firefox it also only shows 1 template

So it appears that the missing content has nothing to do with the microsoft.com "unsupported browser" warning - very odd.

Final update: One commenter notes that "MSIE 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158 shows only 1 template", so it seems that the open-source browsers are not alone in being rejected. I guess we can assume there is some rather broken code for browser type/version checking running on that site; it breaks even on a micro revision of the browser. Just one more reason why we should cry out for open W3C standards.

(2004-11-12 05:18:27.0) Permalink Comments [9]