One old, more and more people join the search engine's competition, this, it is a good thing after all. And no one will look at Microsoft's attack ._________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________, according to Wall Street Daily, Microsoft new search engine first uncover the veil.
According to the news, Microsoft uses a search page to change the search page on the MSN website, using a more concise design similar to the market leader Google. However, Microsoft will now continue to rely on Yahoo technology to search and make relevant text advertisements.
At the same time, from this Thursday, Microsoft began to launch a trial version of its own search technology. The trial version is a separate web page. Through this page, people can finally understand this software giant, and have prepared a year's search engine. Microsoft hopes to compete with Google and Yahoo. Microsoft plans to discard Yahoo's non-advertising techniques at the end of this year, and use its own technology. Microsoft did not announce the amount of investment in the program, but a single MSN search site has invested $ 100 million.
Standard & Poor's Securities Analyst JonathanRudy said, "Search will be an important driving force for their overall strategy." He said that Microsoft needs to find new growth areas to supplement its strong core business.
Microsoft has the ability to include Search technology with the market's Windows operating system and the universal IE browser. In addition, according to research institutions Nielsen / Netratings, MSN is the most accessible website for US users, with approximately 100 million unique visitors per month. As an illustration of it has far-reaching influence, Microsoft said that its MSN's Toolbar software has been downloaded more than 15 million times since 12 weeks ago, it has been downloaded more than 15 million times - almost the same number of toolbars similar to Google and Yahoo, and then The launched time is earlier.
Of course, Google and Yahoo will begin counterattack. Both are expanding the search page range and provide more user-friendly search results, such as search results for user locations. Google has announced the launch of free email services, making direct competition with Microsoft's Hotmail. Small competitors are also continuing to innovate. Recently, new features have been launched, users can preview web pages from search results and make more effective searches.
Yahoo's spokesperson said, "Competition is inevitable, we will use the best user experience to meet competition." The spokesperson added that Yahoo has known the ambition of Microsoft in this regard.
So far, Microsoft has been in the lower wind in the contest of these relatively small and flexible competitors. The company acknowledges that many consumers have complained its search service, and Microsoft's high-level recognition has a defect. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked about Google in January, they were stronger than us.
In the public, Microsoft's senior people keep humility. Yusufmehdi, Vice President, said, "We have a long way to go." Mehdi said that he was not ready to announce the new search website of MSN is the best similar product; he said, this site will be early The best choice for other service users using MSN.
An important challenge for all search technology is an understanding of simple problems. For example, when consumers enter "Chips" (potato chips, wafers), it is necessary to figure out that consumers want to understand snacks or semiconductors. Microsoft's senior people said that its search engine can understand the capacity of direct white English queries will be an important advantage with competitors.
Through such a "natural language" system, consumers can enter "Who is the US 17th President?" And then get the answer. Some Search companies such as AskJeeves have already accepted search queries for natural language. But Microsoft refused to provide any other details this week.
According to research institutions, COMSCorenetworksinc. Accordingly, MSN's search engine ranked third in the United States, dealing with 15% search query business. But with Google and Yahoo have been far away, the latter two companies handle 35% and 30% search query. Microsoft's own research shows that many users think that MSN's search sites are slow, full, and search results are also difficult to satisfactorily. Mehdi said that some pages have too much advertisements related to keywords, so that users are difficult to discover search results. He said that there will be more than 3 advertisements in the search results above the search results - all are text formats, no pictures. Search page advertisements will be more obvious to solve the problem that consumers complain cannot distinguish between advertising and non-advertising. Mehdi said that MSN no longer uses "payment", this controversial approach means that the website pays for more frequent updates in the main index of the search engine. The new MSN search website allows users to limit search, such as searching only in a dictionary or in Microsoft's Encarta digital encyclopedia.
Microsoft's senior people like to point out this: The software code of the new MSN search page home page is 54 bytes higher than Google. This fine difference may be ignored by most people, but this is a symbol of a more concise, more quickly page design of Microsoft. Mehdi said that approximately five months of test showed that consumers used a new design page, which was higher than that.
This redesigned page may be a powerful tool to attract readers. A consumer survey released by Vividencecorp shows that Google's competitors can shorten the gap between Google by copying its simple style. Vividence is a research institution studying a search engine market. Yahoo plans to introduce a redesigned search results page. Researchers said that about half of consumers use multiple search sites.
Mehdi said that he expects the new design of the MSN search page to attract more users, although the restriction of the number of advertisements per page in the short term will lose advertising income, but this will eventually mean the increase in advertising revenue. Mehdi refused to disclose Microsoft's total investment in search technology and the number of employees working in this area.
The company is using Sandbox (Sandbox.msn.com) in MSN, the initial trial operation of its search technology is to get feedback from the website owner and others. This technology will obtain search results from approximately 1 billion files on the Internet, while Google and Yahoo only get search results from part of these files. Mehdi said that Microsoft does not use its own search technology before the Search results of MSN are as good as Yahoo authorized technologies.
US Internet users search tool usage:
April 2004, April 2004
Google 35% 31
% Yahoo 30% 29
% MSN / Microsoft 15% 14
% Times Warner
/ US online (aol) 11% 17
% Other 9% 9
The following is the address of the MSN Search:
http://search.msn.com/default.aspx
% Description: Calculation by 25 search engines
