I failed to point this out in my earlier post, but I had assumed that
Netscan is something Microsoft created to keep track of the various
complaints by users of MS products (mostly Windows, I think) to newsgroups
that *existed solely for the purpose of discussing glitches, etc. in MS
programs* -- I believe that it is indeed credible that MS gave up trying
to ID MS-product-related newsgroups solely by title, and simply expanded
Netscan to include all newsgroups.

Anne Lurie
Raleigh, NC


"John Hines" wrote in message
...
"BenignVanilla" wrote:

"Anne Lurie" wrote in message
r.com...
Although I *sincerely* hope that we should never have the need to look
up
the NetScan data-mining website, I'm being conservative by posting this
for
the archives:
http://netscan.research.microsoft.co...eportcard.asp? (BTW,
it's
tough for me to put "I" and "conservative" in the same sentence,
but....)

I may be getting paranoid in my old age, but...... I've taken the
liberty
of starting a new thread called "Netscan Datamining" just in case we
should
want to refer to this in the future. (Anyone who's ever tried to
google
for
a particular post without knowing the exact thread name or poster can
surely
understand my reasoning.)

What is this...I have never heard of it before.

Microsoft recently announce that they are going after Google, in the
search biz.

Looking at the URL in reverse order for the host name, I see
Microsoft.com, their research division, and then a specific project.

So it looks like this a beta test of a new service, which has escaped
out to the net itself.