It looks like Microsoft’s attempted acquisition of Yahoo! has come to an end. Apparently, $46 billion wasn’t good enough, but $50 billion would have been. So what’s $4 billion between friends? Ah well. Mini already has a post up having popped a cork, and I’m sure MSFTExtremeMakeover will have something shortly. And I’m sure there will be plenty of analysis posts as to why, why it’s a good thing, why it’s a bad thing, what might have been, and so on.

So here’s mine!

First, so if I understand properly, Microsoft bid $41 billion, Yahoo! wanted $50 billion. So Microsoft came up $5B more, met ‘em halfway… Yahoo! still wanted the full $50B. OK… so if you can come up with $5, why not $10B? And yeah, I understand, these are scarily huge numbers. But hey, if you’re going to sit down at the World Cup of Poker, you know it’s not a $10 buy-in. I actually wonder if it’s too much of a bet-the-company move… e.g. Microsoft can currently afford anyone that’s $46B or less, but more… not so much.

Second… so what’s next? Well, let’s see….

Option 1: Keep at it! Keep at it! Keep at it!

Well, Satya, Brian, Harry, and the gang have to do something. And now that they won’t have too much of a distraction integrating Yahoo!. Plus, this means that most of Microsoft will now align very closely with services, focusing on ads and search. A search bar in every application, every desktop, every skin. And renewed focus on new frontiers, such as XBox and mobile - especially XBox.

Option 2: Buy! Buy! Buy!

Buy someone else! Or elses! But who? Well, how’s this little gem from comScore:

Baidu Ranked Third Largest Worldwide Search Property by comScore in December 2007

To aid in your research and coverage of Baidu’s recent announcement to enter the Japan market with www.baidu.jp, relevant comScore qSearch worldwide data are provided below.

In December 2007, 66.2 billion search queries were conducted worldwide.

In December 2007, Baidu.com Inc. was the third ranked search property worldwide with 3.4 billion searches, capturing 5.2 percent of worldwide search share.

Worldwide Search Top 10 December 2007 Total World Age 15+, Home and Work Locations* Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
	Searches (MM)	Share of Searches
Total Internet	66,221	100.0
Google Sites	41,345	62.4
Yahoo! Sites	8,505	12.8
Baidu.com Inc.	3,428	5.2
Microsoft Sites	1,940	2.9
NHN Corporation	1,572	2.4
eBay	1,428	2.2
Time Warner Network	1,062	1.6
Ask Network	728	1.1
Yandex	566	0.9
Alibaba.com Corporation	531	0.8

Baidu is the dominant engine in China, NHN is www.naver.com, which is the dominant engine in South Korea. Oh, and today, 5/4/2008, NHN is worth about $11.25B (current price, in KRW), and Baidu is worth $12.36B (current price in USD).

Naver hasn’t shown any propensity to move outside of Korea, and for the most part their stranglehold on South Korea is their huge question and answers site (which is what Yahoo! Answers, Microsoft QnA, and Baidu’s iKnow are based upon). Their search, last I knew, wasn’t terribly great.

But Baidu…. Baidu is doing real search. Baidu just launched in Japan earlier this month. And they have the currently dominant question and answer site, although TenCent, which runs QQ, the dominant instant messenger in China by far, is looking to create their own version that may cause some trouble. And Baidu has got heavy competition from Google.

Now, there are certainly issues with buying Baidu due to the Chinese government. But… well… at the end of the day, those Yahoo customers aren’t going anywhere quickly - not to Google, not to MSN. That’s one of the key reasons why, IMHO, Microsoft wanted to buy them. But that isn’t happening, so those customers stay with Yahoo. Now, Microsoft still needs to get some additional customers somehow, somewhere. If not from Yahoo, and if not from Google… well, for me, I’d start looking abroad really quickly myself.

So, I’m probably the last guy to blog about the latest from our search engine, MSN Search. But better late than never. What’s always amazing to me is how important the UI is to search. One of the major changes we made was we finally fixed title highlighting. For some reason, in the previous UI; the title was displayed all in bold — which means you couldn’t see your highlights in the title, as keyword highlighting was also done in black. For example, consider the query for “Erik Selberg:”

Andy Edmonds and Erik Selberg - Frank talk about MSN Search
Andy Edmonds, lead program manager, and Erik Selberg are two of the geeks who work on making MSN Search better. They talk about how the engine works, and what they’re doing to beat the competition

vs.

Andy Edmonds and Erik Selberg - Frank talk about MSN Search
Andy Edmonds, lead program manager, and Erik Selberg are two of the geeks who work on making MSN Search better. They talk about how the engine works, and what they’re doing to beat the competition

Certainly, these aren’t direct screencaps, but you can see the difference in the title. Personally, I’ve never been that much of a fan of the entire MSN look myself, and I’m happy we’re moving away from it. In particular, I just don’t like a dark background with light text motif, and MSN has been fond of that for some time. I find that text gets lost — and the text we had were the different verticles, such as “News” and “Images.” Then again, at least we no longer have a 9 character search box — there was a winner. But hey, the new “silver” look is an improvement. Frankly, I think weve got a bit to go — the navigation still isn’t where I’d like to see it. The search box gets lost, and the verticles are still not obvious. But we’re getting there… and I suspect you’ll all be happy when we really release Live.

So there have been a few big stories in Search that I thought I’d comment on. I know it’s a bit late, but really, the Steelers are going to the SuperBowl, so I’ve been preoccupied.

First, it became known about the DoJ subpoenas. Essentially, the short version is that the DoJ subpoenas query log data from the four major search players (Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Google). Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL, seeing that this could be done without revealing any PII (Personally Identifiable Information), complied, thinking this was no big deal and not worth the fight. Google, after presumably dragging their feet and trying to get out of it, finally got sued by the DoJ to comply, and promptly vowed to fight this.

Unsurprisingly, everyone is even further in love with Google, and pissed that Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL rolled over. In particular, the main issue I see is that people are worried that when the government does come by and ask for this information that does contain PII, the three named will again roll over, whereas you know Google will fight.

The other fun bit is some choice quotes from Yahoo’s CEO, Terry Semal, and CFO, Sue Decker. From the CNET article:

“We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,” Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”

And comments by Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel after the company posted earnings results a week ago were even more shocking in their praise of the company’s chief rival.

“Frankly, Google has done a better job than us,” Semel told the Associated Press. “It’s like we built our house first and someone came along and built an even better house.”

Certainly, Yahoo’s now trying to back off that on their blog… but really, you’ve got quotes from the CFO and CEO… synchronized gaffes?

Here’s my take on both:

The subpoena — frankly, this feels like marketing and PR to me. Not to belittle it, it’s amazing marketing and PR. There’s a ton of paranoia and fear about privacy, and while most companies are saying they protect privacy, few are actually doing anything to demonstrate they are. Standing up to the government, even on something that isn’t really involving private information, is certainly one way to demonstrate that. And when your competition doesn’t do anything, well, it isn’t a surprise that nearly everyone sees that Google as a company that stands up for people and companies like Microsoft don’t.

Welcome to 21st Century Marketing. Simply put, what has been and will continue to be one of the most important assets for Web services, be it e-commerce or search, is trust. Amazon.com solved this early on with a lot of work on credit card security (they created the Credit Card Motel - cards check in but don’t check out, and had educated customer service to talk to you when you called). B & H Photo and Video managed to be (AFAIK) the only photo outfit in New York to gain trust… the rest (including Adorama, which does business with Amazon) continue to demonstrate why they’re not to be trusted. Google is standing up to the government. What does Microsoft do here? We issue security patches on Tuesdays and make you reboot your computer. Now there’s a warm fuzzy.

And for Yahoo… well, I have no doubt that a number of their team is focused on beating Google (and keeping us at bay) and being #1. But they’ve been pushing out a ton of stuff over the past couple of years — such as Yahoo 360, acquisitions of Flickr and del.icio.us, and so on. And they have gained maybe a point or two. So I wonder if Yahoo management is now looking at Search as a cola market — the market shares are pretty well set, and while you may see a point gain or loss here and there, what really causes market shift is a different segment — e.g. people choosing water over Coke OR Pepsi. And that’s what I think Yahoo means — they’re not going to be about search, they’re going to try and be about something else and get people to move that way. Now, I don’t think that’ll work, but then again, I work for the competition.

Disclaimer: just because I used to work for Real and now work for Microsoft doesn’t mean I actually know anything. In this case, I don’t, so I’m just offering speculation. It’s educated, but likely wrong.

As seen pretty much everywhere, Microsoft has agreed to settle with RealNetworks over Real’s anti-trust suit. Some interesting tidbits:

• $460 million cash money. So Real’s balance sheet goes from $263MM ($363M - $100MM debt) to $743MM… that’s almost triple!
• $301 million in cash and services. As near as I can tell, this means Microsoft advertises and includes Real stuff (which means Rhapsody) and gets a bounty for every subscriber Microsoft sends to Real. Presumably, there’s a minimum number of new subscribers per epoch, otherwise Microsoft coughs up more cash for that epoch.

Here’s another fun bit from the AP article:

Among other agreements, Microsoft’s MSN online unit will feature RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music subscription service on its MSN Music download site. It also will provide links in its MSN Search results that let people listen to songs through Rhapsody.

RealNetworks also will take steps to support Microsoft’s MSN Search, and the companies agreed to jointly promote use of Windows Media technologies with Rhapsody To Go, a music subscription services for portable devices.

Right now, say you do a search for Miles Davis on MSN. You’ll get an Instant Answer blurb about him. Presumably, this means you’ll see Rhapsody stuff there soon. It also means on Rhapsody, you’ll likely see some gateways to MSN Search.

Analysis, speculation, and wild guesses time:

• This is great for all the Real employees that stuck it out. If you’re an old-timer, Real did a stock option buy-back where the strike price was $7.22. Now, all those options for all those employees are above water! Granted, like $0.50 above water, and they could sink fast, but it’s better than hovering between $5 and $6 as it has for the past five years.
• This is the lottery for all the hired guns Real brought on in the past five years. Real has hired a bunch of folks lately, including some well paid execs and almost-execs, who are now liquid. Life isn’t fair, and timing is everything.
• RIP RealPlayer. OK, this is just a guess on my part, but at the end of the day, I think the Real format is dead, and Real is slowly but surely going to have to admit that. Nobody cares about formats, they just care about their music. Promoting Windows Media for portable Rhapsody To Go is the first step. That Cingular deal Real got may also turn positive for Microsoft (just a wild guess there).
• Real has no more excuses for failure. For a long time, Real has been griping that bad old Microsoft was the cause of its financial underperformance… I know a number of people, myself included, that would say at least part of the blame is on sub-par products. I won’t point out specifics, but I’ll just say that if you’re standing up against Microsoft, and the SlashDot crowd hates you, then you might be doing something wrong. With Microsoft no longer playing the Big Bad Wolf, Real is going to be forced to make good products… hopefully, this means some people will actually get back to writing specs and thinking about the end-to-end experience and what’s best for the customer, versus just hacking something out on a deadline.
• And the big one… Microsoft and Real have both realized that nobody gives a crap about either of them in the music space. The real business of streaming media is being able to sell streaming media. People aren’t going to buy players, and really they aren’t going to by servers or converters either. That’s commodity stuff nowadays. So you gotta sell music. The problem is, the only one selling music right now is Apple, because iPods are sexy, and everything else isn’t. So it’s time to join forces and hope that it isn’t too late to get into the game. Gonna be interesting for a few years I think!

Just a random point in space on the current round of Search Wars (III, by my counting… I was from 93 - 99, won largely by AltaVista, and II was the rise of Google over all).

The latest Media Metrix search market share numbers put the market share of search as 46.4% Google, 30.5% Yahoo, and 15.5% MSN. I’m counting AOL’s 9.9% share for Google, as Google powers AOL. The rest is Ask, InfoSpace (MetaCrawler, DogPile, and others), and others.

OK, these seems reasonable.

However, if I count the search referrers to my blog (most going to my Unlock AudioVox 5600 instructions post), then I get the following:


754 Google
93 MSN
54 Yahoo


In percentage terms: 83%, 10%, 5%.

I’m going to do some more digging… I’m in the top 3 results for all engines, so it can’t be a “Use MSN / Yahoo, fallback to Google” pattern. But really, are we saying that people looking for hard / esoteric stuff use Google THAT dominantly?

What really surprises me is the Yahoo number. I could believe (or make up) lots of reasons why the distribution for MSN is so low compared to Google… customer skew being what I’d guess (MSN has different customers than Google, and they tend not to be the type to go unlocking an AudioVox). But Yahoo being only 5% is just… well… weird. That’s really, really, really low…

Bloggers out there: if you have ‘em, I’d love to know what your referrer counts are! Here’s a quick one-line command if you’re on a linux / apache system (in /var/log):

zcat `/bin/ls -t access.log*gz | head` | cat access.log access.log.1 | egrep -v 'tide[0-9]*.microsoft.com' | awk '{print $11}' | egrep 'google|yahoo|msn\.com' | sed 's/.*\(google\|msn\.com\|yahoo\).*/\1/' | sort | uniq -c


[Update]

OK… so I thought that perhaps one reason for skewing is that perhaps Google rates my site overall very highly, MSN not so much, and Yahoo hates me. Or maybe Steph’s still mad about that dinner… Anyway, looking just at my unlock page, we have:


94 Google
2 MSN
0 Yahoo


Yow.. OK, so MSN has a 2% share there, but 0 for Yahoo? That’s just kinda bizarre… more later on what those Yahoo folks ARE looking for… although doesn’t seem to be much. Weird.

I haven’t had a search post in a while, but there’s some posts out there I thought I’d talk a bit about. In John Battelle’s book The Search, he expands a bit about where search ought to be in the last chapter of his book. Our own Robert Scoble adds his own $0.02 on the perfect search, followed by a response by Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Watch.

Here’s the gist: We used to have great features, many powered by people, and we don’t anymore. We want them back.

Yes and no.

There’s a lot less human editorial in search nowadays, and that’s a good thing. It allows us to scale, not just in the size of the web, but also globally. Anyone know what the best page for comparing cellular plans is in West Africa? Me neither, and we’re not hiring editors to figure that out. That’s why smart people develop algorithms to look at the web — links, body, etc. to figure that stuff out.

Anyone remember Magellan by McKinley? It was an early competitor to Yahoo back in about 1995. The idea was to hire a bunch of human editors to create a large “best of the Web” version of Yahoo, with each site rated and quality checked. McKinley isn’t even around anymore, at least according to the new real estate page at www.mckinley.com, let alone Magellan.

That being said, one thing we aren’t doing all that well at is enabling people to spread their own information. Yahoo is making some moves here with their social searching stuff, but it’s not even close to what I want.
For example, for an upcoming trip to China, I’m trying to figure out if GPRS works on a China Mobile prepaid SIM card. So I use the query “China Mobile prepaid SIM GPRS setup.” Google is crappy, so is ours at MSN (and they even look crappier), and Yahoo’s results don’t completely suck.
.

This should be an easy query, if not for the potential cross-lingual issue here. All I want to know is for a China Mobile prepaid account, how do I set up GPRS? Presumably, there’s a FAQ on the China Mobile website. Probably in Chinese, but I suspect it’s there. Or at least on some other support websites, as it seems that it’s there, just not quite what I want.

But yet nobody really gets it.

Human editors aren’t really going to help with this, but human beings might. This is where blogs and forums come in, especially forums. I managed to find a few where this question had been asked and answered, and so I’m pretty sure I know what to do now.

So now the question comes… how do we enable and harness human knowledge in a meaningful way? Not just indexing documents on the Web, but truly indexing knowledge for mass consumption. That’s the question. And while we used to have lots of nifty features on previous (and some still living) search engines, we still haven’t begun to tap into searching human knowledge. It’s just that tough of a problem.

Oh, and I’ll except this from Danny’s post, worth the read:

FYI, John asked me for thoughts on The Perfect Search that didn’t make the cut for the book. But if you’re curious, here’s what I emailed him back last September. I’ll ask him if I can add in the email I was responding to, that puts my response in better context. If so, you’ll see it added here later. My response:

I can’t imagine such a world. It makes a nice pitch for the search companies, but knowledge is a messy thing.

If we’re talking about indisputable facts, it’s a bit easier. Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States. I know of no one who questions that.

Who was the first person on the moon. Neil Armstrong — unless you are of the contingent that believes moon landings never happened. OK, I think those folks are crackpots. But the perfect search that comes back with Armstrong isn’t the perfect search for them.

What’s the answer to gay marriage? Who killed Kennedy? Was Bush right or wrong for going into Iraq? Is the MMR vaccine safe for children?

None of these can be answered definitively. They’re more than just questions with nuances. They’re questions that have answers ultimately determined the by reader themselves, answers that may be different for each person, based on what they choose to believe after reviewing many opinions.

I can envision a system that tries to collect for you a variety of references on topics. Maybe it even assembles them into an encyclopdia-like, wiki-like page. The assemby of this knowledge might be considered “answers” by some. To me, it still represents the start of a knowledge quest. It’s akin to exactly how search works now — a list of references, with the searcher still needing to explore.

I’m sure we’ll see search advance on simply pointing people to the easy stuff, the facts that can be produced, direct navigation to web sites and so on. I’m also sure we’ll see search improve to better understand what we’re interested in, based on past habit and visits. But all knowledge will never be accessible, unless they figure out a way to digitize the minds of everyone living and dead. Even when dealing with what knowledge we do have chronicled, distilling a perfect answer is impossible. God could provide a perfect search as you outline. Search engines aren’t God today, and they’ll never be.

Having said this, I was agast last year when some Wi-Fi exec likened Google to God in Friedman’s column. While we may not have the perfect search, nor will we, some people may believe search engines (and the web by extension) already offer it.

We’ve had articles about judges searching the web themselves to see if they can dig up evidence. Fox News lamely tries to defend calling the BBC anti-American by citing search counts. Students apparently are abandoning traditional research methods and assuming the magic little search box brings up the right answer. I’ve watched people spend tons of time searching for a company’s phone number rather than just calling information. Two television shows I watched this week had characters talking about how they “Googled” something, with the assumption that whatever they retrieved must be correct. Some people already believe a perfect search tool exists, and the way it is shaping them is that they’re relying on it too exclusively.

So the threat is this. In a world where people believe a perfect search exists, that world may fail to seek out knowledge in other ways. Someone blogs something that’s factually incorrect. Search picks this up. There are no other references out there. Search is perfect, ergo, what’s wrong becomes right. No one bothers to actually follow up on the fact.

I was fortunate enough in college to hear Loren Needles from Analytica talk about the need to fully question any facts. At the time, he talked about how a recent hurricane had been blamed for a dropoff in some economic indicators. In short order, he quickly demonstrated how there was no way the hurricane could have cause a dropoff of such extent. Despite this, newspapers across the country accepted the explanation as fact.

That’s what a perfect search potentially does for us, makes us less questioning because we think the answers are all in that little box. They aren’t, nor will they ever be.

I was invited to take part in a Press Conference announcing the new MSN
Search in Brasil, which we launched Aug. 3rd. Turns out I was in for a
bit of a treat — I got my picture taken with Osvaldo Barbosa de
Oliveira, the head of MSN Brasil, which appeared in Valor, a local Sao
Paulo economic magazine. Still trying to figure out if I need a
subscription to see the content or just fill out the form….

Anyway, we had a good press conference (about 10 local reporters) and
MSN Search was received pretty well. Like in most places, people in
Brazil tend to use Google or Yahoo, but they’re starting to see what
we’re doing and take some interesst. It’ll take time, certainly, but
it’s coming.

Some other fun facts about Brazil… some 70% of Orkut, Google’s
social-networking thing, are Brazilians. That’s about 6 million of the 8
million people on Orkut (which, in the grand scheme of things, makes
Orkut one of the smaller networks, but hey, Google doesn’t get it right
all the time!). Also, MSN Messenger is the #1 messenger there —
Yahoo’s a distant third, and AOL (AIM) really has no presence in Brazil.
ICQ (also owned by AOL) is also small now, as that product really hasn’t
done much in about 8 years.

What does this mean? Turns out Brazilians like networking and talking to
one another, a lot more so than I’ve seen elsewhere. Huh. Learn
something new every day.

That evening, my hosts Guillherme and Tiago took me to a nice dinner at
the Valermo (?) Grill, where I had a lovely picanha-cut (a local cut,
not sure exactly how it compares to any US cut) steak along with some
lovely sides. Mmm… Brazilian beef is just yummy.

Andrew, Julie, and I talked that evening for some time, all lying in our
hammocks listening to the frogs and crickets, drinking our cervejas.
Then we finally succumbed to the night. The next morning, it was early
to rise, and then hop on the boat for the ride back.

However, once we got to the bus stop, things started to get a bit dicey.
The bus was an hour late, and while the pastry-covered cheese and fried
cheese sticks were awesome, we were still a bit panicked about making
our flight — 3 PM. So, 10 AM, we’re on the bus to Manaus.

Fortunately, we made good time, arriving in Manaus at 12:45. Antonio was
there, and we booked it to the Hotel Ideal, the youth hostel where
Andrew and Julie stayed, to get their stuff, and then to the Hotel
Tropical for me to check out and get my stuff. Then, over to the
airport, were we arrived at 1:55. Plenty of time. We then stood in line
for quite some time and eventually got on the flight to Sao Paulo.

We parted at São Paulo… I was staying for a few days to visit MS
Brasil, and Andrew and Julie were heading home on American and
Continental, respectively. We didn’t have a long stay in the Amazon, and
we were all wishing we had 3-4 more days up there, but it was still an
amazing experience that we’ll treasure for many, many years.

Andrew, Julie, and I decided to take a side trip up to see the Amazon
over the weekend. Now, saying, “Let’s go see the Amazon” when you’re in
Salvador is just like saying, “Let’s go see the Empire State Building”
when you’re in Seattle. It’s across the country, and the country is
*big!* Nevertheless, if your choice is visting the Amazon for 0 days or
2 days with long flights, well, go for 2. Totally worth it. But I get
ahead of myself.

Andrew and Julie had taken off Thursday to get things settled. I needed
to stay for the morning at a workshop, but left Friday afternoon. The
plan (and I know this will sound monumentally stupid) was for me to go
to Manaus (via a lovely stopover in Brasilia), and the next day in
Manaus, a guide would pick me up from the hotel. We’d then go to a bus
stop, where we’d go 3 hours by bus to somewhere, and then by boat for 30
minutes or so to the camp on the Amazon and meet Andrew and Julie who
were going up the day earlier. I found out later that they gave me a
50-50 chance of actually making it. Thanks guys!

As it turns out, aside from a 5 hour layover in Brasilia instead of a 3
hour one (where I met a great guy from Greece on his way home after
bumming around Brazil for 3 months, and a lovely lady who works for the
Brazil equivalent of the FBI on her way home as well), everything
actually worked out exactly as planned. I got to the hotel (the Hotel
Tropical, which is really nice, very old (like 20s construction, but
with lots of old Brazilian dark hardwood, even on the floors) and
crashed, and the next morning at 7:30 the guide showed up. It was Kris
Gomes, the son of the owner of the tour shop (Jungle Experience, owned
by Christopher Gomes. Apparently, he gets a lot of business from the
write-up in Lonely Planet, and seems to earn it well!). We then went to
the bus station where Antonio (our cab driver) dropped us off, and let
me know he’d be there to pick us up tomorrow afternoon. We hopped on the
bus and trucked up 3 hours to somewhere. The buses were these MarcoPolo
busses by Mercedes-Benz; air-conditioned tour buses, really.

By the way… using the toilet on these things is one of the more
challenging things you can do. I don’t recommend it unless you really,
really need to use it.

We made it up to some small town where Kris handed me off to a local
guide, and then we were on a boat (just a small dingy with an outboard
motor) cruising up the Amazon. Well, the Rio Urubu, which is a
good-sized tributary. 30 minutes later, I met up with Andrew, Julie, and
some other camp-mates (Rebecca from London, there with Federico, an
Italian, and Jean-Francios, a Frenchman who was spending 3 months
traveling randomly on holiday.

Wow, things can actually work!

SIGIR Day 3 brought the paper session to a close, but we had some of the
best papers for the end. In fact, the best paper of the conference from
IBM’s Haifa lab (which won the $1000 award sponsored by IBM… go team!)
was the very last one, but a very good paper nonetheless. They were
finally able to get some results on predicting query difficulty — e.g.
predicting whether the query would answered with high confidence, or
determining if the results were likely not to satisfy the user. Good stuff.

Xing Xie, one of our researchers from MSRA, put together a trip to the
Pelhourinha for 30 of us (turns out there were about 30 MS people, not
20 like I estimated!) to see a show and then go to a churasscara, which
is Brazilian BBQ. The show was similar to the one we saw at the banquet,
with the difference being some of the dances. No group samba at the end
(ah well), but the second dance was this guy with a big (~24″ diameter)
bowl of burning sterno on his head and two smaller (~6″) bowls with
burning sterno in each hand. And naturally, there was fire moving
everywhere… fire! fire! heh heh… fire!

Ok, I like it when people dance around with fire. It’s a crowd-pleaser.

They also had the best capoeirha that I’d seen… about twelve guys, all
of whom were amazingly built. And I found out why — they were doing
one-handed handstands, high back flips (like you see 14 yr old gymnists
do in th Olympics, but these guys are 6′ tall and they’re on a hard
stage, not a springy mat), and all sorts of other moves to warm things
up. Then, the capoeirha, which again was fantastic.

Fantastic.

We then went to Sal E Brasa Churrascaria, which as I mentioned is
Brazilian BBQ. There’s a buffet for not-meat, where they have fish,
fruit and veggies, salad and pasta, a fair bit of sushi (apparently
sushi is big in Brazil), and some other stuff like wild rabbit. I didn’t
try that. Then, at your table, waiters come by with meat on a skewer and
offer it to you. If you say, “Si, por favor” then they slice off a hunk
o’ meat — such as a thin steak of filet mignon, rump roast, or
whatever they happen to have.

You eat a lot of meat here. I mean, a lot of meat. And it’s really,
really good. Turns out Brazilian beef (and Argentinian) is much better
than the US stuff, unless you’re talking the US organic. Beef in South
America is free-range and apparently hormone free, so it’s not as fatty
and doesn’t have some of those weird tastes you occasionally get. Turns
out that a Big Mac in Brazil has fewer calories than a Big Mac in the
USA, purely because of the quality of the meat. go figure.

Anyway, we ate. And ate. And ate some more. Mmmmmmm…. protein!

We then piled into the tour bus and returned to the conference, totally
stuffed. Brazil is just great.