Windows Live Writer blog banned from Google search (natural language search, not URL)? | The Coffeehouse

Charles
Welcome Change

Interesting...

Something fishy here. Of course, search engine owners have control, ultimately, of the results for any given query, but how could it be that a popular blog (lots of inbound links) would be omitted from Google search results given a query of the form "Windows Live Writer"? Of course, the URL textual query pattern of "windowslivewriter" returns the expected results: a link to the Windows Live Writer site on spaces.live.com...

What's up here?

Thoughts?
C

JohnAskew
9 girl in pink sweater

Oh, that's disgusting.

Hey, let's blame a rogue server on the farm! Seems pretty flagarant.

Are bids for first-page search results per word coming next?

Internet search is going the way of TV news...

Matthew van Eerde
AKA Maurits

I wouldn't read too much into this.

Charles
Welcome Change

Well, one is left with the need to read something into this... It seems rather odd.

Of course, perhaps it is naive to think that businesses built on search would not use tried and true competitive business tactics to gain an edge over competitors for their own products. All businesses do this. It's called Business. Still......

Could you imagine a world where "contextual search" really means search results that benefit the search engine owner in the context of their business plan and not the true relevance/accuracy of the search results?

Google's Big Brother Search Engine Services: Get the results that We want you to see...

Not for me. Search must remain free, as in free and freedom from business subjectivity in search algorithms.

Time for me to boycott Google. I must say I hate the egregious use of AJAX on Windows Live Search, but what the heck, at least the results aren't tainted (and they better stay that way).

C

Matthew van Eerde
AKA Maurits

The reason I don't read so much into this is that "Windows", "Live", and "Writer" are all very common words. In a sense this is just Microsoft marketing karma for using dictionary words to describe our products.

Charles wrote:
I must say I hate the egregious use of AJAX on Windows Live Search

Me too!

Rowan
Look, no errors.

This does look very interesting, but something tells me that a page with over 400 HTML errors and enough code to sink a boat doesn't deserve a high rank anyway.

There has to be a better reason than "Google doesn't want people to find Live Writer".

Charles
Welcome Change

Matthew van Eerde wrote:
The reason I don't read so much into this is that "Windows", "Live", and "Writer" are all very common words. In a sense this is just Microsoft marketing karma for using dictionary words to describe our products.

Well, wrap the three words in quotes... You still get the wrong result set.
C

AndyC

Matthew van Eerde wrote:

Charles wrote: I must say I hate the egregious use of AJAX on Windows Live Search

Me too!

Whilst the "scrollbar" has some issues, I have to say I vastly prefer the WLS results display in general. After using it for a while I find the constant paging in Google to be rather frustrating (although I still use it a lot as the results are generally better!)

Charles
Welcome Change

AndyC wrote:

Matthew van Eerde wrote:

Charles wrote: I must say I hate the egregious use of AJAX on Windows Live Search

Me too!

Whilst the "scrollbar" has some issues, I have to say I vastly prefer the WLS results display in general. After using it for a while I find the constant paging in Google to be rather frustrating (although I still use it a lot as the results are generally better!)

Are the results really that much better? In the light of this post, I'd argue that WLS is more accurate and without possible business-subjectivity-tainted algorithms...

Matthew van Eerde
AKA Maurits

Charles wrote:
wrap the three words in quotes... You still get the wrong result set.

The result set looks right to me... we could quibble about ordering, but every page in the result set has the search term...

LaBomba
Summer

I've come across this before...

I use Google as my primary search engine, i noticed a couple weeks back that when i tried finding the MSN/Live Spaces of a Microsoft team on Google it just would not come up!

I had to go to MSN Search to find the team blog I was looking for and it took me all of 6 seconds, first result bam!

It really does seem like Google are leaving Live Spaces out of their results...I don't like this behavior, time to drop Google as my primary search engine?

rjdohnert
You will never know success until you know failure

Remeber what happened when I put the MSN Search box on the Blogger site, they sent me a nastygram. Seems Googles not too keen on MSN, Microsoft or Windows Live content.

LaBomba
Summer

I smell a Google Park coming on...

ohh Jamie? Big Smile

Charles
Welcome Change

Matthew van Eerde wrote:

Charles wrote: wrap the three words in quotes... You still get the wrong result set.

The result set looks right to me... we could quibble about ordering, but every page in the result set has the search term...

Do a search on windowslivemail. That's the correct result set, based on inbound links...
C

JChung2006

It doesn't surprise anybody that Google does this, does it?

LaBomba
Summer

JChung2006 wrote:
It doesn't surprise anybody that Google does this, does it?

That said, do you use Google as your search engine?

Charles
Welcome Change

Now that Scoble has blogged this and will be heading to Google tomorrow to get an answer (among other things...), we'll get to the bottom of this.

Go, Scoble, go.

C

Matthew van Eerde
AKA Maurits

Charles wrote:
Do a search on windowslivemail. That's the correct result set, based on inbound links...

Nah... windowslivemail is a much less common term. Hardly any of the pages in the "Windows Live Mail" search have windowslivemail in them.

Charles
Welcome Change

Matthew van Eerde wrote:

Charles wrote: Do a search on windowslivemail. That's the correct result set, based on inbound links...

Nah... windowslivemail is a much less common term. Hardly any of the pages in the "Windows Live Mail" search have windowslivemail in them.

That's a URL term...

LaBomba
Summer

Search about Windows Live Spaces on google, you'll find blogs external to Microsoft talking about Live Spaces, but you won't find actual created Live Spaces in the results...

kriskdf

If you don't like some things (like JS Ajaxy stuff) about Windows Live Search, please hold tight, we're working on the next version. We've used feedback from the beta to make some great changes.

As for Google's issue, it looks like they are putting a LOT of weight on "Windows Live Writer" in the <title> of the documents that it returns first. I theorize that this is an algorithmic issue (but could be wrong).

Also, it looks like the very first link is a download for Windows Live Writer (I haven't installed it, but it looks to be the case). Some people might argue that having the first link in the results a download for the application you are searching for is highly relevant.

It is strange that the blog home page doesn't show up on the first few pages.

JohnAskew
9 girl in pink sweater

JChung2006 wrote:

It doesn't surprise anybody that Google does this, does it?

Yes. A man of Principle assumes likewise. This is the USA. Mad

LaBomba
Summer

kriskdf wrote:
If you don't like some things (like JS Ajaxy stuff) about Windows Live Search, please hold tight, we're working on the next version. We've used feedback from the beta to make some great changes.

Cool. Found more on this here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/default.aspx Smiley

AndyC

Charles wrote:

Are the results really that much better? In the light of this post, I'd argue that WLS is more accurate and without possible business-subjectivity-tainted algorithms...

Well it's debatable, of course. Generally speaking I still think Google has a slight edge, for more awkward to find stuff it generally does better. As I said though, I prefer the WLS results format and, as a result, am tending to use it more and more.

For this one specific result, I'm just going to put it down as a quirk. As others have pointed out, the first link you get is to a download of Windows Live Writer, which I'd call a pretty relevant result.

Why I should assume that Microsoft's algortihms would be any less business-tainted than those used by Google I'm not sure. Perhaps a little bit too much Kool-Aid this morning, eh Charles? Wink

Zeus
Why is the caption missing??

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