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Microsoft Is No Threat To Google -- Yet
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
If the new search's loads of glitches are fixed fast, it has
huge potential
In the past decade, searching the Web has grown from an academic
experiment to a multibillion-dollar business. Microsoft (MSFT )
has not been a player, being content to outsource its MSN Search
service to rival Yahoo! (YHOO). Now, Microsoft is offering a homegrown
search engine, but, despite some nice touches, it has a long way
to go to challenge industry leader Google (GOOG ).
A public trial of the new service launched on Nov. 11, and it has
some very rough edges that suggest it was pushed out before it was
quite ready. Still, it's a big improvement over the old Yahoo-powered
MSN Search, which is what you still find at the standard MSN search
page and the MSN Toolbar. To use the new service, you must go to
beta.search.msn.com.
There you will see a simple, clean search form. You type in your
search term and click either the "search" or "near
me" button. The first runs a standard Web search. The second
restricts the scope to a city or region.
The odd results generated by a "near me" search reveal
the considerable gap between Microsoft's ambitions and reality.
The top 10 results in a search for "furniture stores"
in Washington turned up a newspaper in Kenai, Alaska, but no furniture
stores closer than New Jersey. By contrast, local searches at Google
and Yahoo both gave 10 Washington furniture stores.
When you type in a search term that can be interpreted as a factual
question, Microsoft will try to give you a simple answer from its
Encarta encyclopedia. For example, "capital of Ohio" returned
the answer "Columbus" and a click on "Encarta Answers"
took you to additional information on Ohio. Unfortunately, the encyclopedia
search is buggy. "Who shot Lincoln" prompted MSN to ask
"Were you looking for 'who shot' near Lincoln, Neb." Typing
in "President of France" offered no answer but did gave
a link to a speech presented in France by the president of the Church
of Scientology.
ONE HELPFUL TOOL IN THE NEW MSN SEARCH is the Search Builder,
which gives advanced users an easy way to fine-tune results. You
can tweak the search algorithm to vary the weight given to the preciseness
of the match, the popularity of the site, and the frequency with
which it is updated. You can do the same thing in Google, but only
if you know some arcane query commands. You can also restrict the
search by country, region, or language, limit it to a specific site
or domain, or get only a listing of pages that link to a specified
site. And the search-results pages are clean: The only ads are clearly
identified sponsored links that are even less intrusive than Google's.
Like Google, Microsoft offers the option of restricting your search
to images and news sources. But unlike Google's eclectic collection
of media outlets from around the world, Microsoft favors a relatively
small collection of well-known, mostly U.S. sources. Usually the
first result comes from MSNBC -- one of the few places, besides
Encarta, where Microsoft has succumbed to the temptation to promote
its own products and services.
Microsoft does not plan to make the new version the official MSN
Search until early next year. That gives it plenty of time to fix
the glitches. The company is also still building its index of the
Web and says when it is finished, it will not only be bigger than
Google's but will be updated far more often. In the meantime, however,
Google is going to find things that Microsoft misses.
Microsoft's next big search move will come in a few weeks when
it supplements its new Web search with a desktop tool that will
find files on your computer, as does the new Google Desktop Search
(BW-Nov. 22). Microsoft's unparalleled ability to integrate its
search tools into Windows, Internet Explorer, Outlook, and other
Microsoft Office components could give it a huge competitive advantage.
But first it must greatly improve the quality of its new search
service.
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