The column running Monday afternoon in PC Magazine will be about Microsoft’s efforts in search. As you can see by the stats above the company is outgunned by a massive margin by both Yahoo and Google. I wonder if they are really serious about any of this. I’ll link to the column on this post when it goes up Monday afternoon.
Microsoft is very capable of overcoming MSN & AOL, Yahoo! & Google is another story.
A.H
Microsoft IS MSN.
I think one day Apple will overtake Macintosh!
As I’ve mentioned before some of these searches are IE directing people to MSN whereupon they promptly go to Google so they can get relevant results. It’s got to be at least some of these ’searches’. Most of them? Last time I used IE you couldn’t make it use Google to search, for instance, if you typed an address in wrong. So in other words even this pathetic number is inflated!
I’m not totally convinced about Microsoft being able to do search properly, but it does seem that they are working (at least in R&D) on “next generation search”, and maybe they are just sitting this round out.
Whether they fail at this or succeed, I wouldn’t be surprised, either way.
Every time I tried to use MSN to search all I got back were ads without any useful information. I gave up on them a long time ago.
Has anyone else here noticed that the internal search engine at microsoft.com is absolutley useless? It’s a very bad sign for Microsoft.
It’s far more effective to search microsoft.com with Google.
In every industry there is the 800lb gorilla. Google is the alpha search engine, everybody else, the betas. This is not bad. Money can still be made by finding a niche market and excelling in it. MSN has to find that niche. It can try to overthrow Google but I don’t think they have the talent to do so, although they certaintly have the cash. What niche? Hmmm…what about an image search. A search that begins not with search words in a field but with an image. One can upload an image, say a picture of John, and MSN can bring back results of other pictures that resemble that person with the top hits actually being him.
I’m not the first to remakr on this (in fact, it was probably John), but Microsoft has become IBM. They think and move like a gigantic old-time industrial company, rather than as a forward-thinking innovator. Not to completely discount the R&D and innovation they do, which is admirable, but they have never been a company that comes up with next-generation solutions. They can go from 1 to 100 really fast, but they can’t seem to go from zero to 1. So whatever they come out with in search will likely be too little, too late. And I agree with Greg: you need Google to find anything on microsoft.com.
Years ago I used Yahoo and similar for searches. Didn’t like it. Now use Google as first choice. Also like their Image search feature.
Sometimes I use their autmated translation program , but it helps if you have some knowledge of the language chosen, vis: Latiin, French, German, etc. Never use MSN.
Too bad Bill Gates quit DOS programming in the early 80’s. He learned a lot using it.
jj
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