Is Microsoft the New Google?

Some time in the late 1990s, probably ‘97 or ‘98, I saw XML co-creator Tim Bray speaking at one of those XML (or SGML?) conferences. This was back when Microsoft was at the height of its Imperial Evilness and Netscape was the hip new kid on the block. Or so conventional wisdom would have had it. According to Bray, who was working with both companies on the new XML spec, Microsoft was acting how you would expect Netscape to, and vice versa. (These are my memories of something that happened ten years ago, so I may have some or all of this totally wrong.) It seems that the Redmond juggernaut, feeling the heat of the web paradigm shift, was playing nice with third parties, whereas by all accounts Netscape had become insufferably arrogant and hard to work with.

I was reminded of this just now when, for the hundredth time already this week, I typed a few keywords into my Google Toolbar, snagged the first link with “Copy Link Location” and pasted it into a chat program. Only the link was all ugly and obfuscated, because Google intercepts your clicks for its own nefarious data gathering purposes before it redirects them to the appropriate site. Frustrated, I tried Yahoo Search to see if it was any better in this regard, but it fiddles with the search result links as well. Of the Big Three, only MSN Search seems to provide clean results. A minor thing, perhaps, but the offerings are so close that I’m almost tempted to switch over to MSN. In any case, link crapola (it’s old news, I know) is one of a host of things about Google that strike me as more or less evil, and it’s intriguing that, in this case at least, Microsoft is the one to have chosen the path of good.

Update: As stated in the comments, it turns out Google doesn’t mess with the URLs if you’re not logged in. Depending on how you look at it, this might be more or less evil than I originally postulated. Personally I’m not entirely comfortable with the fact that a site that I always considered a simple search engine (enter text, see results) has morphed into a portal that seems hellbent on gathering stats about me without my explicit permission. Yahoo appears to modify the URLs whether you are logged in or not. But the weirdest result is MSN. Despite what I said yesterday, when I tried it today I got screwy links just like with Yahoo (i.e. whether logged in or not). I guess this kind of invalidates my point about Microsoft (surprising no one, I’m sure), but I can’t understand why I experienced different behavior just now. Maybe I’m working too hard?

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6 Comments »

1. Question is, was it a considered decision to not tamper with the URIs or just plain not having figured it out yet? Judging from the rest of MSN, I’m inclined to choose (b)

   Comment by Kingsley — 3/28/2006 @ 7:23 pm

2. That’s interesting because I’ve never had a problem with disgusting links in Google…I guess it just depends which search you’re doing.

   Don’t they have the URL in green at the bottom anyway?

   Comment by Mike — 3/28/2006 @ 8:10 pm

3. You may want to use the CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension. It fixes this issue and many others.

   Comment by Tristan — 3/28/2006 @ 10:44 pm

4. Not sure what you checked, but the Google website doesn’t do that. Google Toolbar seems to suck for many more reasons than just this one, so I wouldn’t use it.

   Comment by ingo — 3/28/2006 @ 11:01 pm

5. In my opinion you only get those ugly URLs from Google search when you are logged into your Google account. Hit log out and the URLs are clean again …

   Comment by Jürgen R. Plasser — 3/29/2006 @ 12:21 am

6. MSN ranks standards compliant sites higher than Google, apparently. It also validates. Of course, this might mean nothing at all.

   Comment by xexagon — 4/7/2006 @ 2:18 pm

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