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by Alan Williamson.
Original Post: Microsoft's Sandbox or MS-Google
Feed Title: Technical @ alan.blog-city.com
Feed URL: http://www.ibm.com/us/en/
Feed Description: (Technical) the rants of a java developer trapped in the body of a java developer!
Have you been over to Microsoft's playpen, or sandbox http://sandbox.msn.com/ ? This is where they are showing off all the tools they are developing to basically knock out Google (or so it would seem). Next week they are releasing their much touted search engine that will apparently give Google a run for their money. I don't have anything against Google, but I am trying to de-Google myself of late, look up other search engines to see the results they give me.
Their news site http://newsbot.msnbc.msn.com/ is actually not too bad and looks a little better than Google's. Some nice touches there with respect to images for a given story for example. Although nothing here telling me if this page is edited by hand or by computer. I would assume computer since the task of putting this together would take a huge human effort.
One of the funny things that you will see when you look at the sandbox is a project called LookOut. This is a search engine integration into Outlook. Lookout is the nickname, anti-Outlook people give Microsofts email client. Typical Microsoft to utilise that and turn it around in their favour. Personnally never had a problem with Outlook, but having been using Thunderbird for the last year and bit, I can't see myself going back.
I have played around with their search engine and while it is a little slow (they do warn of that) the format is remarkably Google-like. Although in all fairness, how many other ways can you really present a list of URLs with a description. Ran a couple of searches and even found some well known phrases where 0 results came back. I assume this was just a fluke on my part. That said, I have noticed an increased crawl activity on Blog-City blogs with respect to the MSN bot, so we know a lot of our blogs are sitting in the new search database ready for unleashing.
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One of the funny things that you will see when you look at the sandbox is a project called LookOut. This is a search engine integration into Outlook. Lookout is the nickname, anti-Outlook people give Microsofts email client. Typical Microsoft to utilise that and turn it around in their favour. Personnally never had a problem with Outlook, but having been using Thunderbird for the last year and bit, I can't see myself going back.