Highlights: Microsoft revamps its Live Search engine

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Highlights: Microsoft revamps its Live Search engine

Microsoft tonight unveiled the widely rumored revamp of its Live Search engine. Here's a summary of the news:

A results page for a product-related search. (Click for larger image.)

The company says it has made improvements in relevance, the measure of how closely the results match a searcher's intent. Among other things, it has increased the number of documents in its search index by four times, to more than 20 billion. Microsoft says it also has tried to improve the way it handles difficult queries -- better recognizing common abbreviations and misspellings, for example.

Based on its own research, the company claims it has now equaled Google in relevance, although Brad Goldberg, Live Search marketing general manager, acknowledged that people will have to judge for themselves.

As it added new features, the company focused in particular on entertainment, shopping, health and local data, such as maps and businesses. On results pages for some of those queries, Microsoft is moving further away from the standard list of links to something that feels more like a specialized page on the topic.

For example, a search for a particular model of camera automatically generates a page with key information about the product -- divided into sections for thumbnail images, prices, excerpts from user reviews, and collective user ratings, which the search engine calculates automatically from multiple sites. (Click image above to see what this looks like.)

Rather than going after entirely new users, Microsoft says it's primarily trying to get more queries from people who already use Live Search for some searches. "Just improving that engagement will have a material impact on our search share," said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Search and Advertising Platform Group, in an interview.

Whether or not the overhaul helps the company's market share remains to be seen: As noted last week, Microsoft's share of the core U.S. search market fell to 11.3 percent in August, from 12.3 percent in July, according to numbers released by comScore Networks. Google's market share rose to 56.5 percent, from 55.2 percent.

Posted by at September 26, 2007 9:01 p.m.
Category: Search

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I think taking a larger share of Facebook would be a good move. Facebook is preparing itself to be the platform of the web and this is exactly what MS needs. Also incorporating facebook services with outlook and hotmail could be extremely useful. Unfortunately, a complete buyout would put MS's name behind the service which could turn users away (as fickle as young people are) so, like the previous 250 million investment, it would need to be quiet."

-- Wilker, on Poll: Whom should Microsoft pursue next?

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