Web Search–Microsoft
Microsoft To Offer Weblog Search Engine
More from MS today.
+ More press for their news search service. Kudos to the reporter for mentioning that Newsbot has been online (for 10 countries and regions) since October at this url. Also, why is MS touting a 4000 source crawl? Rocket News, Yahoo News, and NewsNow offer thousands more. I would also bet that Topix will soon offer more sources.

+ From the article, “Microsoft is claiming a first with MSN Blogbot, a service that will let users search Web logs, or “blogs,” personal-journal type Web pages that have become increasingly popular. MSN Blogbot will aggregate content from hundreds of thousands of Web logs and index that content based on which Web logs are most popular and credible, Redetzki said. The service should go into beta soon, and Microsoft plans to introduce MSN Blogbot worldwide…”

Perhaps I should take the kudos I just gave to the reporter back. Microsoft might be claiming this is a first but the reporter should know and have mentioned that it’s NOT. Search tools like Feedster, Daypop, and Technorati, and Waypath have been available for several years and do an impressive job. A few comments from Scott Rafer, CEO of Feedster, in this post from the Seattle Times MS Weblog.

+ For your long range (very long range) radar. From the article, “Microsoft said it is working on a natural language search engine, dubbed MSN Answerbot. This service will take questions from users and find answers on the Internet, rivaling a similar service from Ask Jeeves. No release date for MSN Answerbot has been set, but [Karen] Redetzki, [a product manager for MSN] says it is about three years away.”
See Also: Want to See A Massive List of Weblog and RSS Search Tools? Check this Page from FaganFinder
See Also: “Web Question Answering: Is More Always Better?”
A 2002 paper by Microsoft researchers.
See Also: “An Analysis of the AskMSR Question-Answering System”
Another 2002 paper by Microsoft researchers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2004 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.