MSN Search favors IIS

Here is an interesting read. Supposedly MSN favors sites that are hosted on IIS and boosts your rank by several percent.

http://www.ivor.it/goog/orig/

http://slashdot.org/articles/05/04/26/1228227.shtml?tid=109&tid=95

Why am I not surprised that Microsoft favors sites that are hosted on their software???

Well, they certainly rank my Linux-hosted sites quite nicely, so its not like everyone has to rush out and change hosting companies.

What would answer a lot of questions would be to run this test while spoofing your server's information (just to see if it is Microsoft giving meaningless favors to its customers, or if Microsoft is actually exploiting its technologies to enhance crawling, indexing, etc)

I would bet that the latter is true. You could easily write a script, also, that compares numbers of pages indexed on sites based upon whether they are IIS, etc.

There is also a huge flaw in that it is very possible that this relationship is wholly specious. That is, MSN favors other site qualities that lend themselves to individuals who use IIS (for example, businesses, or .com sites, advertisers, etc.) It would not surprise me if MSN's search follows the money and, unfortunately in our marketplace, that money likes to buy Microsoft products

Just a couple of thoughts.