Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

MSN Search Biased Towards IIS Servers

Yesterday’s Slashdot morsel entitled “MSN Search Engine Favors IIS” doesn’t really come as a sur­prise. Ivor Hewitt found that search res­ults on the new MSN Search favour res­ults from sites run­ning on Microsoft’s IIS server.

His research shows as much as a 10% bias in res­ults, using thou­sands of quer­ies made up of ran­dom words, though he admits the bias may be down to MSN developers’ famili­ar­ity with cod­ing applic­a­tions that talk to IIS servers.