SEL: Microsoft's MSN Search Slowly Gains Pace

check out the Digging into Search swicki at eurekster.com

Search marketing in the new media era.

May 02, 2005

Microsoft's MSN Search Slowly Gains Pace

The Seattle Times has a great summary of Microsoft's entry into the search arena. The report looks at the failures, the successes and the continued developments.

Here are some extracts that I found interesting...

...Microsoft didn't just miss the boat in search technology. It missed the dock, the pier and the turnoff to the marina.

...MSN knew very little about building a search engine. Moss and the developer, Keith Bernie, set an ambitious goal of indexing 5 billion Web sites. They unleashed their primitive crawler on the Internet, hoping to build a vast collection of Web pages that could be searched by an engine. But after a week, they were stuck at 24 documents.

...So far, MSN's new search engine hasn't caused a vast market shift, but it appears to be growing in use faster than Google. From January to March, according to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings, Google's market share went from 47.1 percent to 47.3 percent while MSN's went from 12.8 percent to 13.6 percent.

...Microsoft's search team has grown to 500 engineers and marketers, and the Microsoft Research division is so involved that 25 percent of its high-powered Beijing lab focuses solely on search.

Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |

...the search industry queries new media