DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS, WHICH MEANS WE MAY RECEIVE A COMMISSION IF YOU CLICK A LINK AND PURCHASE SOMETHING. PLEASE CHECK OUT OUR DISCLOSURE POLICY FOR MORE DETAILS.
February 1, 2005
Greetings (cause that’s how all the geeks in your high school would say “hello”)…
Go and have a gander at the letter from Bill Gates (we think they should have used the “Teen Beat” 1983 spread photo instead) announcing the new MSN Search service. We’re still playing with it and no verdict yet – strangely searching with MSN Search Service feels alot like using a “Frankenstein-ed” version of Google.
Wait, what’s this? Not only does the image search settings page look EXACTLY like Google’s image search settings page (yes we were searching for nude photos of Angelina Jolie) but there’s a default location setting that was automatically populated with our city and state? Microsoft claims “Knowing your location sometimes helps us provide more relevant information.”
Hmmph. Yeah, looks like I will be sticking with Google for now.
MSN Image Search Settings Page – What City and State Are You In Today?
MSN Search Launched |
A Letter from Bill Gates
UPDATE: This link for MSN Advertising does not like Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari web browsers, no way no sir:
Please Upgrade Your Browser
You are using: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
To view this site you must use:
Microsoft® Internet Explorer or Netscape® Navigator 4.0 or higher
Click here to find the latest free browser from Microsoft
it got my location wrong. I’m in winston-salem, nc, but it thought i was in charlotte, nc. That’s about an hour’s drive and winston is not a small city.
The fact that they want ANY location is enough to give one the heebies, but that may just be me.
Spotted I was in the UK. So, we have a settings page with all the same options as Google’s, but you can’t set the display language to Latin or Swedish Chef? Plus, there seems to be an off-site tracking image from atdmt.com. Think I’ll stick with Google 🙂
Google does this too, for us outside the u.s. anyway: It automatically switches the url’s .com with that of the country your in. At least there’s a link to the original, that’s where I can use froogle or google-news, but I can’t bookmark it. Not even mentioning all the adds…