Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more: be afraid of monopolies?

be afraid of monopolies?

Mike Shaver has an interesting post up about search results.

I'm going to assume that this is a case of incompetence rather than abusive and anti-competitive behavior -- not that they deserve that assumption of innocence.

Posted by asa on September 24, 2007 1:56 PM

reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.

I find that pretty shocking.

Definitely not a case of incompetence, if you ask me...

Posted by: Martijn | September 24, 2007 2:13 PM

I think it's unlikely to be malice towards Firefox; if anything, it's likely to be a bias towards Microsoft's own servers (intentional or due to an interaction with crawling or authoring patterns or whatever) combined with questionable choice of relevance rankings beyond that.

Posted by: shaver | September 24, 2007 3:27 PM

I vote incompetence. How do they expect people to ever start using Live if they serve up results like those?

Posted by: David Naylor | September 24, 2007 11:31 PM

The results vary if depending on your browser. What this article reports is what IE shows. If you run the same query on Fx or Opera you get the "expected" results...

Very interesting

Posted by: earlpiggot | September 25, 2007 5:13 AM

Sufficiently ****witted incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Posted by: Mark Tyndall | September 25, 2007 6:42 AM

Ran the query on Firefox and got the same as the article.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7

Posted by: Mr Lizard | September 25, 2007 2:35 PM

Actually here's a funny thing.

Search both Windows live and Google for the word 'developers'

Live provides a host of Microsoft-based pages.

Hit No2 on Google is the Steve Ballmer 'developers developers developers' video....

Posted by: Mr Lizard | September 25, 2007 2:38 PM