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Differing Google/MSN News results
A very interesting debate on Dave Farber's IP list dissects the difference in news headlines about Google's recent hiring of Kai-Fu Lee and Microsoft's subsequent lawsuit. Jason Lee Miller of Webpronews posted a link to an inflammatory story claiming bias:
When the search terms "Dr. Lee court documents Google Microsoft" were entered into Google, the majority of results were emblazoned with the phrase "lawsuit is a charade" in large comforting letters, repeated again again again.Richard Wiggins debunks the story using a common sense analysis of the different methodology of the two search engines. (I have to say that while Wiggins makes a good case that Google is not manipulating the results, his argument that Microsoft is not doing so boils down to "why ascribe to malice what can more easily be ascribed to ineptitude." I'd love to see someone make a stronger argument for the unbiased nature of Microsoft's results.)
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Comments: 2
Jeroen Wenting [ 8 August 2005 12:22 AM]
And your point?
Either you believe that both are possibly manipulating the results or neither is, you can't have it both ways.
Why should Google's results (which are of course anti-Microsoft...) be unbiassed by nature when Microsoft's results (which happen to favour their views) aren't?
Or is it maybe because Google's results more closely match your own political views?
Tim O'Reilly [ 8 August 2005 10:01 AM]
Jeroen --
Did you read the linked to posting? It made a fairly convincing argument that Google's results were from major news outlets and would naturally rise to the top based on pagerank. The explanation for the Microsoft results was far weaker: they don't do a good job on search, so they have less authoritative sources like bayoubuzz.com at the top of the list. That's why I said I wished his argument for Microsoft were more convincing. I wasn't suggesting bias (in fact, if you notice, in the body of my post, I noted that Wiggins debunked the charges of bias), just that the argument was more convincing on one side than the other.
(P.S. When I posted my notes from Bill Gates interview at D, I got the opposite comments, as people contrasted my obviously pro-Microsoft agenda :-) with Dan Gillmor's critical account of the same interview. (See the second comment on that blog entry for a link to Dan's piece.)
Or see my Shuttle Diplomacy Between Allchin and Stallman piece, in which I went to Redmond to talk to Jim about the "I'm an American" comments that were being seized upon wrongly by free software advocates as suggesting that Microsoft believed open source was un-American. Or look at my piece, Opportunity Lost, Challenge Declined, or many of the other pieces you'll find at http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource. You'll find that my views are fairly nuanced, and not at all one-sided. I'm as critical of free software orthodoxy as I am of Microsoft.
While it's true that I've been critical of Microsoft many times over the years, I try to be critical on substance, not reflexively. Unlike a lot of my fellow open source activists, I believe that Microsoft is a great company, which set the stage for the industry we're exploring today, and continues to drive the industry forward in many ways. Heck, even the buzzword of the day, AJAX, which Google Maps put on the main stage, has its roots in xmlhttprequest, a technology Microsoft introduced years ago in Internet Explorer.)