Microsoft Claims Worlds Best Search Engine Soon

kw writes "Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google in six months in the United States and Britain followed by Europe, its European president said on Wednesday. "What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google," said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa. That timing would presumably coincide more or less with the launch of Vista."

same trick as msn search

[pimpimpim]

maybe Vista will have a default link to this site for everything that you do in Vista, more or less like the trick in IE now where any misspelling will lead you to msn search by default. That way you'll get the "more hits than google" allright. Still won't make you a good search engine though.

I hope they do

[mccalli]

Honestly, I hope that they do. I find the quality of Google search results has gone down, and I would appreciate a competitor doing better and forcing Google to take a more serious look.

I don't mind that it's Microsoft, so long as the site is accessible from multiple operating systems and browsers. I honestly don't mind who it is, but I would appreciate seeing the link-farm problems disappearing. A competitor getting rid of them, and without plastering adverts of their own everywhere, would get my searching.

Cheers,
Ian

Its about time.

[DeadSea]

Microsoft has been showing the signs of being able to build a search engine to rival Google for some time now.

• Bright people working for them
• msnbot has been crawling as much as googlebot for well over a year

Put those two together: a good source of data and a bunch a bright people and you should be able to build a great search engine. I've been waiting for MSN to turn up the juice for a while now. I've recently been seeing some signs of it, I don't doubt there are better things to come.

Until three months ago, microsoft search seemed to favor front pages of sites to a ridiculous degree. Most of the traffic to the sites I monitor came in from the msn search engine to the front page. This was despite the fact that the crawler had visited scores of sub-pages. The only reason I can think of for this is that branded search terms would probably give better results. If you search for the name of a company, you would almost be certain to get their home page. It was almost no good for finding facts though. Recently this has begun to change and sub-pages are starting to see hits referred from msn search.

I'm hoping that Yahoo picks things up too. With their recent purchase of del.icio.us, they have another fairly substantial datasource of popularity of pages. I'm hoping that they start giving Google a run for their money as well. I'm less optimistic with them though as their relevency team seems to be out of touch with users such as myself. They seem to highly favor in-house content over better external content and they seem to think that much of what people search for is items to purchase rather than facts or even product reviews.

OK, Maybe...

[ursabear]

So perhaps maybe Microsoft can build a search engine solution that is "better" than Google. Of course, there's no way to know until it is useable.

However - and this is big - how can Microsoft change the habits and behavior of many millions of users? Google has almost become synonymous with "web search" in the hearts and minds of millions. Particularly among the folks under 20 (lots and lots of people in my life), the phrase "Google it" is used maybe more than once a day. I like to use much of Google as it is - familiar, reliable (as much as I need it to be), and always extremely quick.

Can Microsoft become more important and more used than Google? I guess anything's possible, but I think time might tell us otherwise.

In other news...

[liangzai]

* Microsoft will ship its most secure flagship Vista this year

* Microsoft will dominate the digital lifestyle soon

* Microsoft will be better than iTunes any day now

* Microsoft will soon fucking kill Google

* Microsoft will soon prevail with its Windows Media architecture over the standard standards

* Microsoft is not evil

Better Google by MSN?

[rivo]

Google's strength is in their good search engine, in
their brand and also in their set of very good web-based
applications.
Very good as in very standard compliant and compatible
with any browser, to the point that somebody starts
saying it will be less and less relevant which particular
OS people use.

How can Microsoft beat Google in this area without
stepping on its own feet?

Anyway until the vapourware condenses into something real
there's not much to comment on...

Andrea

Vista phising protection

[diegocgteleline.es]

In vista (in IE7, actually), everytime you enter a url in the browser, the browser sends the url to microsoft to know if the url is safe or not

This is sold as a "phising protection" - microsoft has a list of "bad" sites and the browser will know when you're being a victim of phising.

On the other hand, this is also a useful trick to know what pages are visiting the 90% of the world population, a really interesting data source for a search engine.

Linux Vs Windows search results

[Siroro]

Ironic search results: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=linux+vs+wi ndows [google.co.uk] The first few results are quite unbiased.
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=linux+vs+wind ows [msn.com] The first few results clearly favour Windows.
If Microsoft want their search to be more popular their results have to be unbiased to be taken seriously.
Just food for thought.

msn != google

[moochfish]

MSN can't win the search war in its current form. MSN is not a search engine, it is a portal. Google is not a portal, it is a search engine. MSN can compete against Yahoo, another portal, but if it wants to win the search war it needs to ditch the content war and slash its MSN landing page into a minimalist design. That aint happening anytime soon, and, thus, this announcement is a bunch of balogna.