Amazon drops Google, chooses Microsoft

[whiterabbit]

[washingtonpost.com...]

Amazon have changed their search provider from google to MS, is this a vote of no confidence in google, or a cheaper option for amazons A9.com search tool?

[randle]

This is all very interesting, and in a way welcome news as it heats up the competition, which is good. However, nothing has changed relative to the core search product, MSN provides. I’m rooting these guys on all the way, and was hoping they would get the AOL deal because we have a lot of sites that rank well there. However, what they have isn’t any different than what they had a year ago; these developments really don’t change anything. In order to start grabbing market share they have to improve their core search technology, they can muscle in all they want but at the end of the day it has to get better; it’s just not very good right now; if-you-know-what-I-mean.

[egurr]

Randle, pick out ten searches and check between Google and MSN and see which one gets you more exact matches on the first page. Mix them up a bit to add a business and a city, and then maybe a how to guide and see what you find. I'll bet you'll be surprised.

[graeme_p]

europeforvisitors, you are exactly right.

Webmasters resent Google because we naturally resent being so dependent on it.

The rest of the world likes Google because it gives the best search results - I regularly try test searches and Yahoo and MSN are not even close.

[snowweb]

I guess Amazon wanted more than just their homepage in the index then! (maybe they checked out the topics in this forum first)

peter

[McMohan]

MS taking in Amazon for its search feed is just an indicator of things to come and MS's strategy for growth, IMO.

Its like a politician running for an election. He can go to each voter and seek his/her vote. But a smart politician will take into confidence the community leaders, influential personalities, movie stars that hold a sway over the masses and make them endorse his candidature.

MS, as we all know, is a good politician of the corporate world :-)

[LeaveMeAlone]

This sort of move has been coming for a long time, and I suspect there will be others.

I have to go with Whitenight here. The arrogance and lack of respect from Google has been clear for a while. Time and time again I've seen sensible people, with sensible questions/issues, trying to contact them, only to be totally ignored.

Combined with the improved search performance from Microsoft, and there is bound to be a shift in the waters.

[Essex_boy]

Id love to see a much more fragmented search arena/market while it would be naive to think that this is going to be it - itis a step in the right direction.

[europeforvisitors]

Id love to see a much more fragmented search arena/market while it would be naive to think that this is going to be it - itis a step in the right direction.

Flipping the calendar back to the pre-Google days, we had:

Excite
Lycos
Infoseek
AltaVista
HotBot
Webcrawler

...plus a few other search engines whose names escape me now.

I don't know that we were any better off then, though. Or at least users weren't. There was an enormous quality spread between the best (AV and Infoseek) and the rest, and a lot of users searched with the crappy engines (such as Excite and Lycos) simply because they weren't aware that they had other choices.