Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1999/10/07/microsofts_satanic_majesty_requests/

Microsoft's Satanic Majesty requests

Google Eyes links Microsoft with Evil

By Graham Lea

Posted in On-Prem, 7th October 1999 14:07 GMT

What is "more evil than Satan himself"? Well, if you put this search term in the rather interesting www.google.com search engine, you get www.microsoft.com ranked first. Fancy that. We thought we had better check the page, and what did we find? Well, Exchange 2000 Server Beta 3. Being a little frightened of matters Satanic, we decided to decline the kind offer of a download of Microsoft's messaging and collaboration product, lest we reached the wrong connections. At least Text100, Microsoft's UK press office, should be pleased that we mentioned the product as it has been pestering us to do, although they it didn't tell us how diabolical it was. So why does Google produce this giggle? It's not a fix, but a result of the ranking being according to the external links, so it merely shows the weight of opinion, in terms of words like "evil" and "Satan", in other sites referencing microsoft.com. Google's worthy objective is to prevent the abuse of metatags in site promotion. It also only allows AND operators in searches, and there is no way to override this. And please, please don't tell anybody about google - it's wonderfully fast at the moment. ®