Search Champs grilling MSN execs

I still want to know why there is no rss feed link on the MSN home page!

What or who is a “Search Champ”?

Thanks for the update Robert! It’s nice to see the Search Champs giving them heck over this. I agree, the major searh providers should be banding together over this one and taking the issue to the government!

jaseone – a “Search Champ” is made up of a group of randomly selected people who go to Redmond to discuss search technoligies and other search related things. You can apply to be a Search Champ when they announce the next one.

Thanks for the update Robert! It’s nice to see the Search Champs giving them heck over this. I agree, the major searh providers should be banding together over this one and taking the issue to the government!

jaseone – a “Search Champ” is made up of a group of randomly selected people who go to Redmond to discuss search technoligies and other search related things. You can apply to be a Search Champ when they announce the next one.

So a randomly selected group of people are deemed champions in search engine technology? By that definition they sound more like a focus group with some Microsoft marketing spin turning them into “search champs”.

John Battelle had a very clever post yesterday about it : allow every single internet user to opt-out from search engine databases. In other words, each search engine should provide a control panel from which all database records can be cleared out.

The goal : trust, trust, trust.

“No one company should use this as PR..”

Interesting spin there. Seems to me Google stood up for its values — that is more than PR.

It’s not unlike when you stood up for lesbian and gay rights at Microsoft. That wasn’t a PR stunt and I don’t think this stand by Google is either.

One thing that Google the, increasingly smaller (look at the China thing), non-evil part of Google is that some people may have search for personal data (phone numbers, name, and address. Is that a concern for the folks at MSN?

The person whose name you didn’t catch is Joe Janes, a professor in the Information School at UW.

Robert,

I appreciate that you’re posting about this. However, with Google getting more evil and MS becoming more open (in large part thanks to your example), I was becoming far more open to MS. But I’m glad that Google is using this as PR: It makes it clear that caring about your users’ privacy is a competitive advantage. And one that Google clearly beat MS and Y on: Enough so that there’s no way I’d ever consider using MSN again unless you made a clear public statement that Mr. Gates would sooner go to jail that comply with a subponea from the government.

MS needs to make a strong public signal that you care about privacy; particularly if you want InfoCards to take off. Maybe MSR witholding any funding from Berkeley as long as Mr. Stark works there?

Dan

Dan,

But Google isn’t consistent. They are obviously playing with some governments, but not with others. Check this out: http://tech.memeorandum.com/060125/p44#a060125p44

Companies are also not static things. Today they might not be evil, but tomorrow?

That’s why I’m pushing for transparency (and they are hearing that bigtime).

During lunchtime the Search Champs went even further. They want a button to click that shows everything that’s being collected from their experience.

That is even more tranparency than what I’m pushing for. But, now that I’ve heard that idea, I’m pushing even harder!

Google.cn is a different beast than Google.com, I don’t really see why Google providing a separate service that is approved by the Chinese government is such a big thing.

Now if they started censoring Google.com then that would be a different story, the story here is about the Chinese government only allowing it’s citizens to access a censored version of Google, it isn’t about Google being evil, I think that evilness belongs with another entity involved in the story.

The Google.cn issue and the one about complying with the US government’s subpoena are two completely different issues so please don’t try to muddy the waters by comparing the two.

“Do not evil” – as long as you can make money. This is Google motto. In China – there is not much money involved – so they will do everything that government will ask. Goal for China is to make sure no new search engine will be born there.

In USA – they can lose money – so they are willing to play games with government.

Even more – once Google will be in trouble with income – shareholders will not care about “Do not evil” and will force Google to do everything to make money. And SEC will help them.

I don’t understand this “no IP / individual indentifiers was released” stance. So the government just knows that “jihad and nuclear” was queried 1000 times on Jan 7th? What good does that do anyone?

Perhaps MSFT handed over information that allowed the government to see that “jihad” was queried for at 11:30AM and then “bomb” was queried for at 11:45 by the same person.

But then what’s the government going to do with that?

And what if the government asked GYM for the IPs / cookie information for people querying for those search terms. Will GYM give it to them?

Thanks Robert–I agree on the China thing. Does MSN have an official policy on China? (If it’s better than Google’s, please do use it for PR advantage!)

What I want to know is “why do you have personal information for me”?

I don’t want you to have it. Stop storing it.

Oh dear lord, WHO CARES anymore.

At least in the US, all I have to do is file the right request, and pretty much for the asking, I can get every bit of info the government has on you, including how much your mortgage is, etc. It’s a side effect of “Government in the Sunshine”.

Considering that every packet you send has your IP and MAC address in it, if someone wants to track you bad enough, they will. You want anonymity, get off the public internet.

oy

Scoble:

Google is not being inconsistent. It is complying with Chinese law that is quite straightforward (no matter how much we might disagree with it).

In the US, it is questioning a law that is ambiguous at best. But it is a nice attempt to spin Google taking a stand into a negative. Keep up the good work.

Oh and Scobleizer –

What happened to the update on MS dropping Windows Media Player support for the Mac?

It’d be interesting to hear MS’s thinking on that.

I think more companies need to explain themselves. I’ve made a public outcry for mine to.

http://journals.aol.com/cybermagellan/savedcase

Everyone is tracking everything, period. Your search/browsing/buying habits are what pays the bandwidth and server costs of all of these “free” services like search, email, etc. I thought it was a generally well known fact. Ever notice how you log in to gmail…and your still logged in at google.com, same for yahoo, I’m assuming the same for msn. You didn’t really think that was for convienience, did you? And it also wouldn’t surprise me to find out that at least one of these giant indexing machines that happen to serve email as well….just happened to be indexing our emails. Ever notice the google ads next to your gmail?

I would really, really like to hear what Kim Cameron has to say about all this and how it relates to Identity.

@jaseone re Search Champs

They’re academics.

http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/11/29/498054.aspx

David: search champs has some academics on it, especially this year cause many librarians were invited, but it’s more accurate to say they invited influential bloggers. Most of the people I’ve met at search champs have really great blogs.