Unlike such gonzo writers as Hunter Thompson, a computer columnist’s literary license normally ends on the “Do Not Enter” side of using the term “greedhead” to describe somebody with whom he disagrees. So I won’t use it here.
But my goodness, what can one say about the newly programmed MSN Search engine that Microsoft began advertising so heavily last week?
Join me in trying MSN Search (http://search.msn.com) to consider what’s at stake. And we need to also consider the competition, Google (www.google.com) and Yahoo (http://search.yahoo.com) to illustrate why Microsoft’s entry in the Web search stakes race should distress us all.
Keep in mind that the advertising-supported search stakes race went nuclear over the past few weeks as Google gleefully announced that its latest quarterly revenues exceeded $1 billion.
The Big 3 of Web search have dominated tech news headlines for weeks now with a series of significant business parries and thrusts vying for ad revenues.
The sparring included all three outfits releasing amazingly useful free software that lets a computer owner index every word in every file name on a hard drive and then retrieve information by Web-style keyword searches.
Then Yahoo launched another torpedo by releasing a superbly fascinating but woefully incomplete service to find video clips using keyword searches. It’s incomplete because the Internet only recently has added movie files to posted content. Predictably much of the searchable video now out there consists of movie trailers and short promotional clips of music videos.
In response, Google disclosed that since December it has been busily recording cable and broadcast television available in its home turf, the San Francisco Bay area. It has followed by archiving the closed-caption readouts of what is said to create a searchable database of everything that goes on over the air.
The goal, according to Google, is to make ad-supported television searchable over an ad-supported Web site.
How much advertising can we mortals muddle through?
Which brings us to where I started–looking for adjectives to explain how Microsoft’s approach is dramatically more money-grubbing than the voracious behavior from Yahoo and Google.
MSN Search looks avaricious even when one remembers that advertising must be the life’s blood of the wonderful tools for empowerment these Web search engines bring us–just as it is for broadcast television, newspapers, radio and magazines.
But, while Google and Yahoo look something like advertising-laced network television broadcasts, MSN Search plays like a relentlessly repeating Ron Popeil infomercial.
Let me quickly add that the complaint isn’t that MSN Search’s returns don’t have the depth of the other two because they do, if you can drill down far enough past the commercialism.
To illustrate, consider what happens when one uses the search term “Pearl Harbor” on each of the Big 3.
Google comes up with the sort of universally useful responses we have come to expect. There are ads in a narrow column down the side of the page and even a couple of pitches at the very top.
Yahoo comes back like Google with advertising pitches down the side but in a noticeably wider column. Still, after two pitches atop the material, Yahoo returns the expected collection of scholarship and pop-culture nuggets that make search engines so useful.
But punch in Pearl Harbor at MSN Search and it’s hype from hell.
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On top of the MSN search results are ads from Netflix offering rentals of DVDs touching on the attack and its legacy. Then come links to all the Pearl Harbor merchandise and trinkets peddled on eBay. Below that is a link to travel agencies specializing in Hawaii.
But the big concern is the links below the ads. Much more than Yahoo and Google, MSN’s search results are centered on commercial sites and people with things to sell rather than useful and relevant information.
Rubbing salt into the wound is that at the bottom of the first 10 answers, MSN delivers a repeat of the three ads at the top.
When it comes to content, Yahoo’s returns are dramatically different. There are many product ads and other pitches, but the results draw heavily from essays on military history, civic groups with a Pearl Harbor bent and a wealth of private Web pages by World War II buffs.
Google oozes comparative class in what it chooses to return below the mandatory top and side ads. Serious scholarship, maps and even private reconstructions of the Day of Infamy abound. And there are no ads at the bottom of the page.
Clearly Microsoft’s search software has been written with a bias toward finding stuff for sale rather than seeking the best answers from the wealth of information that makes the Internet a treasure house of human knowledge.
I Googled the word “greed.” And at the top of the hits was a thoughtful essay on the subject.
Then I used “greed” as a search term on MSN Search. The first item returned was an ad for bumper stickers denouncing greed.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.