Google vs MSN search = Linux vs Windows

great opp to see practical comparison of performance

[Namaste]

Beta.search.msn.com is obviously buiilt with the best that MS has to offer, in terms of code, hosting, DB, etc.
(http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum97/229-1-10.htm)
it will be interesting to see how MSs SE performs in comparison to Google, which is entirely customized Linux, MySQL, etc.

I already find that MSN search is much slower than Google once you increase the default results from 10 to 100

Any of you have any other observations?

[encyclo]

One particularly revevant observation is that whilst beta.search.msn.com is running Windows (IIS5 on Windows 2000, more precisely - not IIS6), if you check on Netcraft, the site is using the Akamai proxy cache network, much like microsoft.com and several other Microsoft sites. Akamai uses... guess what? Linux!

So in short, MSN's search performance is dependent on Linux not Windows for speed, at least in terms of the front page and for popular queries. Looks like Linux wins this battle hands down!

[Namaste]

wow, that's the news of the year!

any idea if msnbot is on iis or linux(via akamai)?