Microsoft Wants to Take on Google

blenderking writes "We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing,", says Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said. Full article at: Yahoo. This could have fit in with yesterday's April Fool's stories..."

Article Text (so you can read it here)

[Anonymous Coward]

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 2 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. the world's No. 1 software maker, on Wednesday said it is taking aim at privately held Google (News - Websites)Inc., the Web-search company that's so popular its name is used as a verb.

"We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing," Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said.

Visse said the company was making some significant investments in developing a better search engine. But the company has not offered specific plans.

Microsoft would not be the first Web portal provider to step into the Web search segment. Last month, Internet media company Yahoo Inc. closed its $235 million purchase of Internet-search company Inktomi Corp.

Microsoft has said its been searching for ways to capitalize on its various technologies, for example data retrieval and analysis, by entering new markets. It has also targeted security software.

Google, the No. 1 Web-search provider, has become so pervasive that it is not uncommon for people to refer to searching the Internet as "googling".

A Google representative could not be immediately reached for comment.

Google has been seen as a top IPO candidate despite a lagging economy, but a company co-founder recently told attendees at a high-tech conference that going public is not on the front burner for the Silicon Valley company.

PC Magazine Quote

[Likes Microsoft]

An article month's PC Magazine [pcmag.com] mentioned this. The author shuddered at what a Microsoft Google would look like, perhaps something similar to the "teenage clutter" of MSN.

Re:No you got it all wrong....

[Pharmboy]

Google also is successful because it doesn't have pay-for-placement results.

Um, actually we spend thousands per month with Google's pay per click sponsored placement. Not as much as we spend on Overture's, but still a lot. They have had this program for about 6 months now. It is different than Overture's in that it combines your 'top bid' along with what it says is relevence, but believe me, its all in what you pay.

That said, it is a great system, cost effective, and generates high quality leads that 3 times more likely to covert than AOL or Lycos. MSN comes second, then Yahoo. Aol has always sucked for conversion (buys during the same browsing session that they clicked on the ad) in the 3 years that I have tracked it. They do generate a lot of traffic, its just traffic that doesn't buy anything.

So yea, Google wants to make money, too. Good for them.

this is an IR problem

[Jack Tanner]

Information retrieval is an interesting field. It has its own ways of measuring performance, like precision and recall. Web search engines want to maximize both precision (the number of sites actually relevant to the query out of all that the engine retrieves) and recall (the number of sites the engine retrieves out of all that are actually relevant to the query).

On a purely technical level, ignoring things like marketing, etc., the Google vs whatever contest is a matter of comparing metrics like precision and recall.

Guess what, it's at least theoretically possible to do better than Google.

Guess what, Microsoft Research has some top people in information retrieval (Susan Dumais [microsoft.com], one of the authors of Latent Semantic Analysis, for one).

If Microsoft wants to compete, it certainly has the ability to do so.

The flipside of this coin is that Google may be "good enough" (in the Yourdon [yourdon.com] sense of the word). But here is where Microsoft comes in with its convenient desktop and browser Monopoly.

Where you been?

[siskbc]

If Microsoft wants to ensure their long term future they need to improve the server OS's and innovate in client software, not worry about being everything to everyone.

Viewing Google as a competitor from the consumer viewpoint is a mistake.

Except M$ got where it is by not caring about security, ripping off others' innovations then killing their company, dabbling in all markets, and only viewing competitors from the consumer viewpoint.

Seriously, when has quality even been part of M$'s strategy (and strange as this may sound, I don't mean that as a flame). If you have an ineffective DOJ, why not just keep utilizing your marketing and monopolistic strength to kill off competitors? Why is there any need to improve?

And sadly, this extends to a large degree to enterprise software as well. How smart is the typical CIO? Even more important, how much does the CEO know about software? Not much, which is why MS software is the safe choice for CIO's. Like the saying goes, buying MS doesn't get people fired (not *quite* true, but you get the idea).

A combination of FUD, astroturfing, buying shill journalists, buying out companies, market-killing monopoly extending has always been a good way for MS to win. Why would they stop now?

Quite frankly, I wouldn't do anything different from how they're doing it, except for their deranged obsession with piracy. If they ever figure out that widespread piracy does for them what they couldn't even LEGALLY DO (ie, dumping and undercutting to achieve market saturation), most of their OSS problems would disappear. Their arrogance in this area is one of the few things that could ever bring them down.

Re:No I got it all right

[Pharmboy]

Are you talking about the paid links that appear to the side of the main results???

I was referring to pay-for-placement being not obvious from algorythmic results.

They have placement ads on the right and at the top. The ones at the top are barely differentiated from the search results, on purpose(The sponsored links). Believe me, this is part of why I use it.

Quoting Google: With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to tell us where to show your ads and pay only when someone clicks on them.

Like I said, we spend thousand a month with just Google. I like google too, but they are just as "for sale" as the rest. Great. Im glad, because I am buying and I like what they are selling.

Re:No you got it all wrong....

[Denjiro]

Notebooks with no OS? Here. Powernotebooks.com [powernotebooks.com]

Re:No you got it all wrong....

[shamilton]

That's why they phased it out!

Fortunately it's still available in 2k and XP as "mplayer2." Far superior to the uber-bloated WMP of today.

Re:Perhaps too obvious, but

[Call Me Black Cloud]

They're not clearly marked as sponsor links? Gee, let's take a look. The first three are marked as "featured sites" by the text, "FEATURED SITES - ABOUT". The next 3 hits are labeled, "SPONSORED SITES - ABOUT" in exactly the same font. Furthermore, the "sponsored sites" which you are complaining about are not numbered and instead marked by a bullet, further setting them apart.

Re:No I got it all right

[benh57]

google ads are NOT called 'placement'. The terms 'pay for placement' or 'paid placement' have very specific meanings in the search engine industry, and google does not use them.

Re:No you got it all wrong....

[breon.halling]

You might want to check out Media Player Classic [edensrising.com] (click on the MPC link) -- it's ol' Media Player, but with a whole whack of features such as DVD playback and a bunch of new supported file formats, including Ogg (audio/video), RealMedia & QuickTime.

Highly recommended. And no, I don't work them. I'm just a satisifed user! ;)

Re:No you got it all wrong....

[Barraketh]

Interestingly enough, as bloated as WMP is supposed to be, it still takes up far less memory than mplayer2. I've just tested this out, and WMP took up only 8,800 K of memory as compared to mplayer2 which took 35,500 when playing a 700mb divx movie. This is physical memory usage - the CPU and VM usage is roughly the same for both.

And the Truth is...

[serutan]

Everybody I know at Microsoft, where I work as a contractor, uses Google as their primary search engine. Here's an example of why: recently at work I wanted the syntax for the VBScript SELECT CASE statement. I already had an MSDN window open for something else, so I typed in "vbscript select case" and here's what it found. [microsoft.com] Not wanting to wade through this mass of irrelevance I typed the exact same thing into Google and got this, [google.com] a whole page of exactly what I was looking for.

Rock on.