Microsoft says better than Google soon

MS European Pres says MSN search engine coming out in 6 months will best G

[christopher w]

Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google in six months in the United States and Britain followed by Europe, its European president said on Wednesday.

"What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google," said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

"The quality of our search and the relevance of our search from a solution perspective to the consumer will be more relevant," he told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit.

Reuter's Story [today.reuters.com]

[Reno]

Here's my ideal webworld:

Google == 25%
Yahoo == 25%
MSN == 25%

Everybody else (GigaBlast, Ask/Teoma, Accoona, et at) == 25%

IMHO, the web will be a healthier environment and almost all of us will get better traffic when the power is less concentrated, as it is when one player gets almost 50% of all search queries. Don't know if we'll ever see such a balance, but with MSN in the game, it is more rather than less likely.

....................................

[trinorthlighting]

I am using MSN for my searches. It seems as MSN has a lot more relevancy. MSN is on the right track...

[security56]

trinorthlighting: I need to join the wagon too. Msn results are far and beyond better then google this days. Someone on Google mess up big time cause google is not the same since the big papi or bigg daddy what ever they call it :)

[Shurik]

For my daily searches I switched from using google to MSN about a year ago. MSN works for me 99% of the time. IMO, google affinity is sociological. Just change your start up page to search.msn.com for a week. See what happens. Once I did it I never looked back. The only time I use google is to see how my sites rank there.

[Whitey]

Microsoft would certainly be watching these threads.

This last month with the "Supplemental Hell" reported on WebmasterWorld threads about Google indicate that it's results are a lot less reliable than they were.

My view is that surfers are persistant and educated enough to challenge their habits, to get what they want in a result. If you search for oranges and get peaches, you'll switch ..... and there are an increasing number of results which are returning not relevant with the faulty supplemental indexing of sites. The disruption is so prolonged it has to be having an effect on user habits soon.

Also, there's a lot of publicity on how it's hurting legitimate webmasters and undermining their trust. So the "goodwill" the community had for Google is being challenged.

If the results are not as good and webmasters are upset, then Microsoft [ and for that matter Yahoo ] has a path to take some of the ground lost over the years.

[old_expat]

"Also, there's a lot of publicity on how it's hurting legitimate webmasters and undermining their trust. So the "goodwill" the community had for Google is being challenged."

I sometimes wonder if the general public, who probably makes up the vast majority of search engine users, really cares that webmasters are hurt.

Does that general public see webmasters as part of *they*? .. i.e. search engines, web developers, web advertisers.

I do believe that webmasters and site owners are seeing a different Google than the one that was around in 1999, but is that great mass of users seeing that same shift?

[security56]

old_expat well that's true but is webmaster that have the power to shift things believe it or not. I brought the Firefox example in another post where it was because of the webmaster who advertise Firefox to be better then ie that there was a drastic change on how many people users started using Firefox.

As you can see webmaster can influence, lets say we started telling internet users how msn results are 100 times better then that of google on our sites people will start changing their habbits and switch to msn.

:) then people might read this and think this guy know nothing about business and how thing work, but my logs have shown the the firefox users going to my site has increase from .5% to 10.5% in less then a year :)

So yes regular users might not know the ins and out, but they will know the ins once we show them on our sites.

[old_expat]

"I brought the Firefox example in another post where it was because of the webmaster who advertise Firefox to be better then ie that there was a drastic change on how many people users started using Firefox."

You are probably right to some extent, but mainstream media announcements about IE security problems had a lot to do with FF populatity.

If you recall, numerous media strongly recommended an alternative browser to IE, and at that time, the no-ads version of Opera was not free.

[crak_bot]

I don't know why so many people stick up for google like they invented anything. They didnt invent PPC advertising, and everything they claim to be getting into is just "me too" type stuff.

Second of all, if MSN PPC works well it will steal advertisers from google which should bring the bid price down for everybody. And as a retailer who sells his own products, I hope I'm right.

Of course, you sleazy types who make money on the fringes by paying for one type of click in hopes your visitor clicks on a more expensive ad, you may not like lower click prices.

[Fall]

Strangly, my site has gotten more traffic from msn than from google.
Even though I have quite some unique visitors (5000 to 23000 daily, it varies a lot depending on content updates), I hardly get any visitors from search engines anyway - visitors find my site trough links in flash games, which do not even get indexed. That's why my alexa rank is rising, but my pr is only 2. This month I had :

- MSN 221
- Google 165
- Yahoo 35

The numbers might be too small to be representative, but still, msn seems to do better for me :)