Search Engines–MSN
Source: CNET
Microsoft prepares for search assault
From the article: “Microsoft plans to kick off a series of improvements to its search capabilities starting in July as it looks to compete with heavyweights Google and Yahoo, Bill Gates said Monday. Microsoft’s chairman told a media briefing here that the company had ’several milestones with its search site’ on the way. In July, the format of the site will change–and so will the quality of what you get–and the way it’ll look is dramatically improved, Gates said. ‘It’ll be later this year that we actually roll out what’s entirely our own back-end driving the search.’ A mundane search task that needs improvement, Gates said, is a query about whether a given flight is on time. ‘Generic Web search today is actually terrible for that, but we should be able to look at your query and say, “Hey, that’s a flight number” and give a response that’s basically just a direct answer to the question, not a list of random Web sites.’”
Note: While we eagerly wait to see what MS is up to in the web search space, the example from Mr. Gates about entering an airline name and flight number is hardly “milestone.” Yahoo and Google (Yahoo’s seems to work better) have offered this service for nearly six months. Ask Jeeves has also been doing some very interesting things with their SmartSearch technology. In many cases, a trigger word isn’t needed and the result appears directly at the top of the results list.
See Also: A bit more in this News.com article

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