MSN Search

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: MSN Search Keeps It Real — Humbug from a Microsoft employee/blogger.

As of right now, querying MSN Search for “anal sex” still returned Microsoft’s homepage as the top result (and Rick Santorum has moved up to #7).

This is actually a good sign. It shows that MSN Search is actually trying to do an honest job of trusting their engine and not gimmicking the results. What would it have said about their credibility if they simply hacked it up to change the search results? Would they have done the same if it pointed to one of their competitors?

If you read Robin Good’s write-up of the recent Search Champs event, some of the suggestions they gave are based on the premise (oft-heard on Slashdot) that Microsoft was planning to play with the search results: “Do not try to push other Microsoft content as default authority by default.” “Respect user privacy like the most scared thing you have.” “Get out of PassPort-like schemes, if ever needed.” “Transparency about results and methods utilized to achieve them is important.” I personally was pretty sure that Microsoft was going to be honest with its search results, but I think the continued anal sex link to Microsoft is actually a very hopeful sign to those who were concerned about it. So kudos to them.

I assume the reason that Microsoft’s homepage comes up first is because there really are a bunch of sites that link to Microsoft using “anal sex” as the link text. I don’t think it would be that hard for Microsoft to fix this in an honest way.

Kudos?

It’s a known fact that at Google they are constantly hand-tweaking the results FOR THE BENFIT OF THE USERS and to minimize the sort of hanky-panky that puts Microsoft at the top of the Anal Sex heap. The way things are now it makes Microsoft look foolish and stubborn too. Just pull it for gosh sakes!! By leaving it you just encourages more people to Googlewash the MSN engine with this sort of thing.

And what’s this nonsense about “fixing this in an honest way?” What? It’s suddenly dishonest to simply delete something?? That’s crazy thinking. Honest way. Geez.

ERASE IT!!!