Ballmer: MSN Search - Coming Next Year

Will Spend $7 Billion this Year Alone on Search

[martinibuster]

Seven Billion Dollars. Those are big numbers.

Google is a method for reaching other websites. MSN is a destination and next year will be the method for reaching itself, a position Yahoo will enjoy for the coming year.

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer [seattlepi.nwsource.com]:

Microsoft... hopes to have some of its own search technology development done in the next 12 months, Ballmer said. It will take longer to develop search technology focused on advertising, he told the advertising executives.

MSN will join Yahoo as both a destination and the method for arriving there (search).

Is it enough to be just a search engine?

Will the destination componenent make or break the search engine wars?

[sidyadav]

Great find martini!

Really helps me a lot - now I have an exact determination of when to remove the msnbot ban [webmasterworld.com]. :)

Sid

[econman]

We are still very early in the history of internet search. Lots of room for improvements, but for some reason I doubt MS will introduce many of them. Among other problems, MS is so fixated on dominating markets and making $$ they tend to overlook, or are reluctant to introduce, improvements that primarily benefit the user. In the short run those sorts of improvements don't necessarily translate into $$, but in the long run they allow firms to increase market share.

Google has been very successful partly because they did a better job finding and prioritizing relevant search results, and partly because they provided users with a clean, almost spartan interface. From a user's perspective that interface is clearly superior to the overcrowded "everyone screaming at the top of their lungs at the same time" atmosphere provided by Yahoo and MSN.

[Chicken Juggler]

ICQ has never really been used by the average person. Nobody outside the computer world has ever heard of it. Yahoo AOL and MSN have been the tops for some time now. Actualy Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger is a good comparison. They are both free and MSN Messenger is built into the desktop and as a matter of fact the MSN messenger will not stop bothering you until you sign up for it. If MSN did something like that they might have a chance. They could shove search down peopls throat that way. If they had a pop up that kept saying your default search engine has chanaged do you want to switch it back. That would be wrong of course and against their lawsuit I'm sure.

[Net_Wizard]

Google has been very successful partly

...because of the support of the webmasters as well, least we assume that 'everything' was just done by Google technology and charisma alone.

[Jaze]

Because people have it in their mind that they need to go to www.google.com to find things. MS gets the people who don't think that.

Certainly gives great leverage and reason for MS to go this way then doesn't it?
That's about what 70% of the population?

MS is focused on money, if they can generate it through a search engine, then they'll do it. Whether they buy someone else out or not, the money they put in is all investment.

[GoingLinux]

I see no way that MS can dominate the SE world by just throwing money at it. First they need to fix the problems they have already in the operating systems and especially Internet Explorer. Why is it any website can throw down any sort of file onto someones computer whether it be html, jpg or spyware? I think MS is pretty lame when it comes to security, which includes protection from spyware, viruses and hackers. Anything that is brought in by IE should stay within IE's temp folders, which it doesnt. Thus everyone has problems with spyware. If MS could control this issue better than I say sure, they could develop a good search engine.

Realistically though at work the only add-ons we allow to IE is the Google toolbar. Why? Because its a fast tool to do searches plus it blocks pop-ups, something IE should do automatically. We have hundreds of users that usually use Google. Not because we force them but because Google is a great tool. Considering the business of writing newspapers and finding information this is very important. What we dont need, businesses and individuals alike, is a company like Microsoft forcing their ideas of security, because we all know MS absolutely stinks when it comes to that. If Linux gets going like they plan then Microsoft will have a big challenge on their hands. People will be able to run a FREE OS that installs easily (such as SuSE), and if CodeWeaver kicks it off they can run any software written for MS on the linux box. Plus of course theres tons of free Linux aps out there already. Microsofts OS's would then be for the weak minded or those that have no computer common sense at all.

I will never let MS take over my computers, keeping track of my name, personal information and with a SE of their own the stuff I search for. On my SuSE laptop I use nothing from MS. On my home pc Im slowly converting everything to higher security, which is doing away with IE, using Firefox or other similiar browsers. Why pay $600 for MS Office when aps like OpenOffice are for free? Have you checked your cookies or downloaded objects recently with IE? I bet you have tons of spies and damaged/unknown objects. Many machines need Spybot, etc to get rid of the constant hammering of spyware on MS. If MS was so great, why would this stuff be on your computer in the first place? Im hoping, along with the rest of the Linux lovers, that by the time all the API are figured out that MS will be finally put into its place. And yes, I used to really like MS... until I waste time and money on the MCSE and operating sytems and other software. They dont listen to their customers, they listen to that cash machine.

For more comments on MS check out:
snipped

Roger

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 4:13 pm (utc) on April 3, 2004]
[edit reason] URL removed [/edit]

[goethe]

I am new to this biz. of SEO. Can anybody tell me what I should or could be doing to prepare my website to be indexed into the MSN index? Any ideas? Will it focus more heavily on links than say Yahoo? Thanks.

[sidyadav]

>> Can anybody tell me what I should or could be doing to prepare my website to be indexed into the MSN index? Any ideas? Will it focus more heavily on links than say Yahoo?
For now, nobody can determine its tactics - not even a professional in this field - however, we can predict that if its from MS (a big company), it will most probably rely on what the "big" ones do at the moment: links, achor text and page context (the basic SEO).

So I guess we'll have to wait and see for the "real" results.

Sid