Microsoft livens up Live Search to battle Google and Yahoo
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Microsoft on Thursday began phasing in a slick new version of its Live Search service in a bid to gain ground on leading Internet search rivals Google and Yahoo.
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Microsoft officially started its new Internet search engine crafted to compete with offerings from rival online powerhouses Google and Yahoo.
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MICROSOFT has stepped up its efforts to compete with rival Google, offering consumers a preview of its technology for searching the internet this week.
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Seattle - Software giant Microsoft is hoping to repel a challenge from Internet rivals Google and Yahoo by launching its own search engine on Thursday, according to reports on Wednesday in the American technology press.
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Software giant eyes search pioneer to bolster its competition with Google.
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Trying to catch up with Google, Microsoft says it will change the way computer users search.
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The problem? Both Microsoft and Yahoo are weak where Google is strong: search.
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MSN Search to Challenge Google and Yahoo  The new MSN Search is a full speed ahead effort for Microsoft to catch Google and Yahoo in the search engine race and are about ready to release their MSN Search Engine. Microsoft has offered a search engine since long on their MSN website ...
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Google practically sparked the fire in the dynamite called Desktop Search genre. Since then, we have seen entry of Microsoft with MSN Desktop Search and Ask Jeeves.
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Yahoo is adding a tool to search computer hard drives as it scrambles to catch up with Google and stay a step ahead of Microsoft in the battle to help users sort through gobs of information on the internet and the desktop.
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Microsoftâs first search technology went live on Wednesday. The software giant claims that the preliminary or âbetaâ version of its MSN Search stands out from other search engines because it offers âmore
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The kinks have not yet been ironed out of Microsoft Corp&#39;s web search engine, but the company has gone ahead with another beta launch of MSN Search that showcases many of the bells and whistles rivals launched incrementally well after they were mature.
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Microsoft yesterday res-ponded to rivals in the burgeoning search engine business by unveiling a test version of a free desktop search tool that will help computer users find information on the hard drives of their PCs.
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Microsoft Corp has officially muscled into the search engine market by launching its Windows Live Search after just seven months in beta.  The company's new search portal boasts several new features, including updated image and local search, related search and an updated user interface.
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Microsoft launched its own Internet search engine in a move aimed at challenging market leaders Google and Yahoo.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft thinks its Live Search can match GoogleÂ in some areas now, but the company has been theÂ underdog in searchÂ for so long it's not even trying to lure users away from its rival -- at least not yet. Showing off a dizzying array of tools to reporters and analysts at its Silicon Valley campus in Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., Microsoft executives said several times that the company is focused on providing a better search experience for current users of Live Search, hoping toÂ get them to search there more often. The Redmond, Wash., company also wants to lure users of its MSN portal to more frequently use Live Search. They compared Live Search's results to those of Google in some cases and said customer research showed its user satisfaction catching up to Google, but didn't talk about grabbing market share. The numbers are damning: About 37 percent of Web searchers sometimes use Live Search, but only about 11 percent of all searches are done on the site, Microsoft said, citing independent statistics. The average user of Live Search does 15 searches on the site per month, while the comparable number for Google is 55. Microsoft runs behind YahooÂ and Google, and Derrick Connell, a general manager in product management at Microsoft, acknowledged that the search product was actually losing market share in the first four months of this year. But the company hopes to gain ground at least among its current base with the new capabilities. Over the past three years, Microsoft has quietly invested in basic things such as coverage, expanding its index to more than 20 billion Web documents, executives said. But it's more flashy additions in video, health, local search and maps that may help Live Search make an impression. The new video search interface, one of the features to be rolled out gradually to all visitors over the next week, lets users play a preview of each video on a results page just by putting the cursor over the image representing it. Using internally developed technology as it "crawls" a video Web site, Microsoft detects moments in a video that are likely to be highlights, said Mike Nichols, a group program manager in Live Search. Those parts are combined in a 30-second preview that searchers can watch to get an idea of what a longer video is like. Audio peaks, flashes of light and scene changes are among the elements Microsoft's automated system looks for. The previews are cached on Microsoft's own servers for quick playing, he said. Microsoft's new specialized health search engine, to be rolled out the following week, will divide results into separate columns for journal articles, Web results and sponsored results. To address consumer worries about privacy, all searches and results on the health site will be encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). In local search, Microsoft is using its Virtual Earth tool for richer results. It can project aerial photographs of places on Virtual Earth's navigable three-dimensional maps of major cities, said General Manager Erik Jorgensen. A tool for users to show highlights of a trip, called Collections, will be enhanced so viewers can just click through the trips or passively watch them in a virtual video rather than looking around a map. The maker of a Collection will also be able to upload the virtual video to sites such as YouTube, he said. Local directions will also be enhanced. Rather than make users enter a starting point, Live Search will offer directions from all the major highways, from which users can choose. As an option, the local search engine will also be able to modify those directions in light of current traffic conditions. Local and mapping features will be rolled out by mid-October, according to the company. Microsoft has done a poor job selling its search offerings, and if it has matched Google on factors such as relevance, few people would believe that right now, said Gartner Inc. analyst Van Baker. The new video, health and local search features are impressive and Microsoft is doing the right thing by targeting current Live Search users and MSN portal visitors, he said. "They've got to make sure that [group] is happy first," Baker said. After that, it may be able to convince others that Live Search is worth a try.
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A beta version of the search engine Microsoft Corp. is developing went live Thursday, offering users an interface and a set of features that make the product begin to resemble established search engines from competitors Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Ask Jeeves Inc. and America Online Inc. (AOL).