Is MSN Trying To Hijack Google's Results?

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Is MSN Trying To Hijack Google's Results?

csr on Thu, 2004-11-11 08:26.

Rumours & Scandal

6 comments

Thread Title:
Microsoft Crawling Google Results For New Search Engine?

Thread Url:
http://webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=31604

Thread Description:

Is Mircosoft trying to use Google's search results to populate their own index?

Microsoft very well could be screen scraping Google (or maybe even using their API, LOL) and crawling the urls it finds. It makes sense from a business case but I wonder if there are any legal issues there.

So now you're saying, so what, big deal. But this really is a big deal. It's a big deal not only because the urls this visitor was making requests to don't exist any longer but because the only place these urls can be found is in Google’s search results using site:www.sitename.com. A similar query on MSN Search doesn't show the urls at all, even on the beta version of their new Microsoft search engine. But then within just hours of the visitors exit from the site the new same search at Microsoft's new search engine shows all of the urls in question being fully indexed within its results.

Comments

Interesting indeed....

twadmin on Thu, 2004-11-11 08:46.

I added another quote to your post chris, just so people can get a good grip on what the thread contains ;-)

I just had a quick skim and one question i have is, where would MS get the Google DB data from? It's interesting speculation but i cant imagine MS being stupid enough to do anything illegal can you?

great stuff, cheers!

not sure

csr on Thu, 2004-11-11 09:17.

if they are trying to get their DB or if they are just using G's results to base their own upon.

i'm leaning towards the latter.

MS illegal? naw, that'd be to conveinent for those looking to bring them down. of course, it'd be tied in court for the next 27 years... :)

Slashdot

andy on Thu, 2004-11-11 14:57.

Something on Slashdot about this too. How are you supposed to read that stuff?

miserable failure - sure is interesting

Jeremy_Goodrich on Thu, 2004-11-11 15:17.

Search results for Miserable Failure @ MSN

Google has whitehouse @ #1, and MSN has them @ #2.

Interesting. Either MSN is spidering Google - or using the inbound anchor text to increase the diameter of the corpus of docs they return as relevant for a query.

Seems like the beta site is faster now too, almost on par with G or Y.

Apparently

andy on Thu, 2004-11-11 15:28.

I spotted this 2 mins earlier in another thread. I like your answer.

Significant surely they are #2 on MSN ??

MSN denies scraping

encyclo on Fri, 2004-11-12 09:02.

For what it's worth, msndude on WebmasterWorld has explicitly denied that MSN is scraping Google:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum97/229.htm

...there has been some speculation on some online forums about MSNBot using Google search result pages to build our index. Let us set the record straight – that is simply not true. We respect robots.txt and as a result we will not crawl Google’s search result pages.