Rewards program boosts Microsoft search share
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Blog: Microsoft Web search share rises nearly 3 percent in June after the company launches program that rewards people for using the search site.
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OSLO/NEW YORK  - Microsoft Corp made a $1.2 billion offer to buy Norwegian Web search software company Fast Search & Transfer in a deal that would help the world's largest software maker expand into the market for business-oriented search.
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Microsoft Corp. on Monday joined the battle for supremacy in so-called desktop search, introducing software for quickly locating files on personal computers that challenges Google&#39;s two-month-old rival product.
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OSLO/NEW YORK  - Microsoft Corp  made a  $1.2 billion offer to buy Norwegian Web search software company  Fast Search & Transfer  in a deal that would help the  world's largest software maker expand into the market for  business-oriented search.
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Google&#39;s Desktop Search application, released as a preview this month for Windows XP and 2000 PCs, searches the hard drive of your PC using the same algorithms that have made its Internet search engine fast, accurate and popular.
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Microsoft Corp., stepping up its efforts to compete with rival Google Inc., will offer consumers a preview of its technology for searching the Internet, beginning Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has added the ability for subscribers of its Office Live small-business hosted service to purchase paid-search advertising from Ask.com from directly within the service. Now small businesses using the Office Live service can use the adManager feature of the product, which is in beta, to purchase search-based keyword advertising from Ask Sponsored Listings, Microsoft said. Customers already can purchase paid-search advertising from the Microsoft's MSN network and Live Search from within the product. Ask Sponsored Listings is an automated, open-auction system that allows for the purchase and management of pay-per-click and contextual advertising campaigns on a publisher network that includes Ask.com. According to the site, 48,000 advertisers use the system to bid on more than 25 million keywords. Last week at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, a company manager said Microsoft would begin adding the ability to purchase ads for third-party search engines to Office Live, which gives small businesses tools for building a Web site as well as Web-based e-mail, instant messaging, collaboration, and customer relationship management, in the next two months. Ask.com is the first such partnership. Microsoft unveiled Office Live in November 2005 as part of a broad strategy to offer more hosted and Web-based services, and the company has high hopes for the offering. Last week at the WPC, Microsoft Chief COO Kevin Turner said that the company expects it to eventually become on of its top-selling products, ranking near the top of the heap with the Windows client OS and Office desktop suite.
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Ask.com enhances its search engine offerings.
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Microsoft has launched a beta version of an MSN search engine designed to compete directly with Google. MSN Search lets users search through more than 5 billion documents, Microsoft says.
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In November, Microsoft representatives began to comment that the enterprise search market had reached &quot;a tipping point&quot;; on Tuesday, the company backed up that claim with a bundle of cash,&#160;offering to buy enterprise search software company Fast Search And Transfer (FAST)&#160;for 6.6 billion Norwegian kroner ($1.2 billion).
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Microsoft has launched its long anticipated desktop search application, and it's packed with promising features and tools that make it a strong contender coming out the gate.
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Microsoft is launching a new look for some of itâs Live Search results in an attempt to win more of the search business from Google.
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Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy search engine company Fast Search & Transfer ASA for $1.2 billion Tuesday, adding software products that help companies trawl for information on the Internet.
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Microsoft has released a preliminary version of its search tool for finding documents, e-mail messages and other files stored on personal computer hard drives.
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(InfoWorld) - Fast Search & Transfer ASA has developed an enterprise desktop search tool that retrieves data from users' PCs, as well as from internal servers and the public Web. Fast Search, in Oslo, Norway, will unveil and begin shipping the application on Tuesday at a price of US$25 per seat. Discounts apply on purchases of over 1,000 seats. Fast Personal Search can be used on its own or in conjunction with server-based search platforms from Fast or other vendors. The ideal set-up is with the Fast Enterprise Search Platform, which lets users take advantage of all of its features, a spokesman said. The application is designed to let employees fetch data from multiple sources with a single query. Fast Personal Search also lets users act on files it retrieves. From within its search-results interface, the application lets users open, launch or print found files. It also offers a variety of ways to sort and cluster results. The application comes with security and administration tools to help IT departments configure, deploy and manage it. Fast Search is also making available a software development kit so that its partners can create services and products based on the new product. Matt Brown, a Forrester Research analyst, liked the product's user interface and set of features for end users and IT managers. It's clear that the application will add value to companies that already have Fast Search's server platform, he said. However, he questioned the decision to charge for the product. Considering that desktop search tools tend to be free, he wondered how willing companies will be to pay for it. "I haven't seen companies making huge investments specifically for desktop search," he said. Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. offer free enterprise desktop search tools. X1 Technologies Inc. recently joined them, making its enterprise desktop application, previously priced from $74.95, available free. And Microsoft has aggressive plans to make enterprise search pervasive in its operating systems. "Looking out five years, I'm not bullish that desktop search will live forever as a standalone category," Brown said. In the meantime, beta tester Kevin Madden is excited about Fast Personal Search. He is chief executive officer of Clooster Inc., a startup that makes software to improve the rendering and visualization of results from other desktop search tools. His company has partly integrated its Clooster Desktop with the Fast product and found the process to be simple and straightforward, using the Fast software development kit. Clooster is now completing the integration. "We're excited with its performance and features," Madden said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Microsoft Corp. has begun providing free tools so government organizations can better share technological information, in a move it says is aimed at helping cash-strapped customers save money.
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Google released enhanced search tools that let companies sift through as many as 30 million documents kept on networks or websites.