Ask Jeeves and MSN Search Engines Compared
Search Engine Journal Ask Jeeves and MSN Search Engine Technology Comparison: "Ask Jeeves and MSN Search Engine Technology ComparisonMSN Search
MSN takes advantage of a technology that no other search engine has tackled – neural networks. A neural network is a series of computers which are supposed to learn based on input provided.
Think about that for a second – a learning computer. One that just doesn’t follow rules assigned to it (which is what the more traditional algorithmic search engines like Google and Yahoo! do) but actually can learn from its results.
Essentially MSN search learns from input given to it. For example, if the search engine is told that Ebay is considered an authoritative site on online auctions, then when a person performs such a search they should see Ebay.com at the top of the search results...
The biggest advantage of such a platform is the engineers at MSN can “train” the system to understand what is considered relevant and important and what isn’t... because of its ability to learn, the system could quickly adapt to such spam content and readjust rankings “on the fly” to filter out these bogus results.
Another advantage to MSN is that the system should be infinitely scalable...Therefore, as new spam techniques are developed, its simply a matter of training the system to watch out for the new technique, flag it as potential spam and even potentially react to it by filtering all sites using the new technique...
Overall, as long as Microsoft can continue to support such a system, I would think that it could win out in the “search engine wars.” The system appears (at least on paper) to be superior to algorithmic based systems, and appears to be able to adapt more quickly to changes on the web because it doesn’t have to wait for an algorithm change to adapt, it only has to learn of the change and apply itself.
Ask Jeeves Search
Ask Jeeves also takes an interesting approach to the web. One that may also be superior to the more traditional algorithmic based engines. Ask Jeeves uses the idea that the web is a series of communities. Therefore they have structured their ranking systems around this idea of communities to determine relevance and authority on the web.
Because they consider the web to be comprised of multiple communities, pages or sites within a community should only related to each other, yet there could be some relation between communities.
A page or site with high inbound community links is considered “worth” more than a site with high inbound links that are not necessarily all community links....This structure takes the Bowtie theory of the web a step further. The Bowtie theory says there are a hub of largely concentrated authority sites with links pointing in and out of this hub to the bows.
Ask Jeeves says there are multiple bowties – each created of related sites and that between these bowties there are connecting tendrils – sites that may be considered relevant or authoritative that can provide linkage between the communities...
Search technology aside, Ask also has some cool features. One of the best I think is that you can ask it a question and almost always get the correct answer.
Unless Google and Yahoo! can continue to innovate and provide new solutions we could see the balance of power shift in the coming years. Because as I’ve illustrated in this article, regular algorithmic search seems to lack in some key areas, such as adaptability and scalability, and the ability to quickly adapt to the changing search landscape."
posted by Jen @ 6:10 AM
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