It’s a short story, but I wanted to note it as we see what Microsoft will do in search in the coming 12 months. From Reuters:
“Over the next 12 months, we’ve got a very aggressive engineering plan with multiple releases of search coming forward. So, I think we are on a positive trajectory,” (Microsoft President Kevin) Johnson said in an interview.
Though also note this line from the Reuters piece: “Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services group, said the company is building on momentum after its Windows Live Search gained market share over competitors in the quarter ended in June.”
Let’s remember that the ComScore report being referenced attributed much of Microsoft’s search gains to its “Live Search Club”—incentivized online games that run searches as the user plays the game. (For example, the “seekadoo” game has you find words in a grid of letters; when you find a word, a Live Search is then run on that word.)
While that certainly does increase the number of searches run using MS Live Search, it’s debatable whether that’s a solid base upon which to build: it’s possible that users will note the search results while they’re playing the games and decide that they should try MSLS for their actual search needs, but by no means is that guaranteed.
Also, let’s not kid ourselves: this is the same line Microsoft has been pushing since 2002. Or later, when they said they’d be better than Google within six months.
At this point, anything they say about their search quality improving isn’t news without some sort of facts to back it up.
Could Johnson be talking about something Gates is planning. Check http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=775
Microsoft lacks credibility *generally* in the Internet space, especially in search. They’ve been touting massive improvements for years now and nothing has materialized to date except for a pile of links on a page.
MSN.com is still burning cash at an alarming rate — this from a company that has billions of free page views each month. Go figure!
I’ve written about Microsoft trajectory before because the only trajectory that really matters is the one at launch. Microsoft is forever wedded to devices; any notion that they can have a breakthrough in search or any other Internet-based technology is goofy. (By the way, today Windows Live Mail told me it could only spell-check the first 2000 characters of my message. There’s a real breakthrough technology in action.)