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IN THE FEBRUARY ISSUE... MSN SEARCH OFFICIALLY SWITCHES TO ITS OWN TECHNOLOGY Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch It's official. Nearly two years after announcing it would develop its own search technology, MSN Search began feeding the general public results found through its own internally developed search engine. The rollout has happened worldwide, including on the main MSN Search site. "Now we have our platform in place. We think it's super competitive to what's out there," said MSN Search & Shopping corporate vice president Christopher Payne. Ousted was long-time search partner Yahoo, in a move that would come as no surprise to that company. While Yahoo no longer supplies the editorial results at MSN Search, paid listings continue to come primarily from Yahoo-owned Overture. Many, if not most, going to MSN Search over the past week or so have already been exposed to the new technology. Under beta release since last November on a special site, MSN migrated the technology in front of users of its regular sites over the past month. Now the beta label has come off. MSN Search is firmly in the search wars and hoping that its new technology -- along with a massive new advertising campaign -- will help it gain users. What's MSN Search have to offer? Largely all the same things we wrote about when the beta launched last year in our article, Microsoft Unveils its New Search Engine - At Last. So be sure to give that a read, if you missed it before. The core search engine is good and a welcomed new "search voice" in the space. However, it does not make a massive leap beyond what's offered by Google, Yahoo or Ask Jeeves -- the other three major search companies that provide their own voices of what's deemed relevant on the web. New Since The Beta Anything new since the beta came out at the end of last year? A few things: * Encarta "Direct
Answer" expansion: MSN has integrated answers from the Microsoft
Encarta encyclopedia since back in 2001. But the beta service expanded
the direct answers provided by Encarta to one million topics. The
final release takes that up to 1.5 million. Gary Price takes a closer
look at this expansion in our Many MSN Direct Answers Now Online
article. What's To Come Now that the big job of getting a crawler-based search engine of its own working on MSN Search is completed, what happens next? I went down a list of possibilities with Payne. * Blog Search: MSN has
promised to do this, something that no major search engine yet offers.
When might it come? Nothing to announce yet, Payne said. So details on what's to come are sparse. Payne's excitement over having reached this important benchmark is anything but. "The thing I'm most excited about is that now that we have this platform, we'll be able to innovate on top of it," Payne said. "We're going to have rapidfire innovation, things no one's done yet." GOOGLE BECOMES DOMAIN NAME SELLER Kieren McCarthy, The Register Google has become a registrar - a company allowed to sell Internet domain names - but told us it has no current plans to sell any. Last week, Internet overseeing organisation ICANN and technical arm IANA, quietly approved Google's application and gave it ID number 895. It is now entitled to sell any .biz, .com, .info, .name, .net, .org and .pro domains (but not .aero, .coop, or .museum). Interestingly though, a Google spokeswoman told us it has no plans to sell any at the moment. The reason it paid a $2,500 application fee and $6,500 to cover six top-level domains is that it "wants to get a better understanding of the domain name system [and so] increase the quality of our search results". The email address it gives with relation to its new registrar status is dns-admin@google.com. Google notes that Amazon did exactly the same thing nearly two years ago. At that time, a March 2003 article in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the online giant had become a registrar and assumed that it was about to launch a domain name selling business. It set the industry off - but we are still waiting, 47 months later. So the question is: why become a registrar if you're not going to sell domains? Speculation is rife. One idea is that it has to do with Google's AdSense for Domains business, which aims at the domain name industry. Google's technology "understands the meaning" of domain names, the company says, and then ties it in with search terms that people type in its search engines. Then of course there is the possibility that it will find a way of tying in all of its other new services and connecting them to a domain name sale. So, for example, you buy "All-in-one.com" through Google and it gives you Gmail, Blogger and whatever else in a bundle. It does a Microsoft of the internet by getting you to use all its software and services and so give itself an enourmous amount of power and control. Plus, if Google was in charge of your domain, it has access to everything that comes in and goes out and could use it to tackle spam more effectively. And then of course, there is the ongoing rumour that Google may be developing its own web browser (it owns www.gbrowser.com). And then the pie-in-the-sky idea that it may release its own operating system. But leaving the Google-heads behind, what is clear is that if you become an accredited registrar you gain an extra level of access to the DNS system and that means you can have a look at the inner workings, experiment with a thing or two and come up with new ideas and improved services. And if there is one thing Google really excels at, it is getting more than everyone else out of the internet infrastructure. Chris Sherman, Associate Editor, SearchEngineWatch Long anticipated, Yahoo's new Desktop Search beta is a solid contender in the increasingly crowded desktop search playing field. Yahoo Desktop Search (YDS) joins Copernic, Google, HotBot, MSN, Ask Jeeves and many others in an effort to provide a richer, more integrated search experience. Yahoo licensed the technology for YDS from X1, a desktop search developer owned by Idealab (Idealab also spawned current Yahoo subsidiary Overture, so there's a history between the companies). For now, there's little difference between the X1 application and YDS, but Yahoo intends to develop customized features for YDS over the coming year, said Bradley Horowitz, director of media search and desktop at Yahoo. YDS indexes a wide range of files on your computer, including Microsoft Office files, Outlook or Outlook express emails, attachments, contacts, pictures and music—more than 200 different filetypes, in all. I like the look and feel of Yahoo Desktop Search. It's a full screen application, and the interface is intuitive and very easy to use. It's similar to Windows explorer, but adds some powerful features that make it easy to work with information on your computer once you've located it. "Particularly with desktop search, you're searching with something with the intention of acting on it, said Horowitz. The left pane has forms and controls for performing searches. Beneath these controls is a list of current files that match your search criteria. The right pane displays a preview of files selected from this list. Above the left pane is a search form and buttons that let you limit your search to email, attachments, contacts, files, music, pictures or files of all types. Clicking one of these buttons displays a set of additional search forms tailored to finding items in that format. For example, with files you can limit your search to filenames, type, dates and time, size or path information. Yahoo calls these "advanced search" options, though they're extremely easy to use. Limiters for other file types include: * Email search: From, To, Subject, Date/Time, Email
Folder Name, Attachment File Name Search results are displayed in Explorer-like format as filenames with additional information. But rather than showing a snippet of a file and making you click a link to see the full document, YDS goes beyond most other desktop search applications by displaying a preview of a selected file in the right pane. "Our application allows you to preview your results in a millisecond, which saves you a tremendous about of time culling from your result set," said Horowitz. To view your results, simply click a filename in the left pane, and you'll see a virtually instantaneous view of the file in the right pane. With documents, your search terms are also highlighted in the preview. Audio and video files are queued up in a mini Windows Media player, allowing you to listen to or watch the files directly from YDS. At the top of the preview pane are buttons that allow you to take action with found content: Open a file, open an email, forward an email, print a document and so on. Horowitz calls these context-specific functions "verbs," and "you'll see that list of verbs increase over time," he said. My initial impression of search quality is favorable. YDS supports phrase searching and Boolean queries, though I found little need for either with most queries. Searching works particularly well when you restrict results by one of the limiters such as filename, filetype and so on. Both searching and indexing are fast. The indexing process is also polite. Though YDS indexed the 20 gigabyte hard drive on my laptop in just under 45 minutes, I was able to continue working without interruption. Unlike other desktop search applications, web search isn't well integrated into YDS, at least yet. Though there is a button for Yahoo web search, all this does is bring up the search.yahoo.com page in a separate version of Internet Explorer. Also missing from YDS is one of the most useful features of Google's desktop search—the automatic indexing and caching of web pages you've viewed with Internet Explorer. Yahoo puts an interesting spin on this omission, saying that YDS maintains web privacy by not indexing or caching the content you've viewed on the web. While that's certainly a valid concern for people who share a computer, or work in publicly accessible spaces, it would be nice to at least have the option to auto-index viewed web content. That's the plan, says Horowitz. "Our approach will to be to give users the right control knobs. With desktop search we're going to be empowering users to make the choices they want." Yahoo does note one security problem in this beta release of YDS: "If you are an Outlook email user and you have archived email into a Personal Folder (.PST) file and have chosen to password protect that file, Yahoo! Desktop Search will index those files. When you do an email search, if one of the emails that matches your query is in a password-protected Personal Folder archive file, you will be able to preview that result in the Preview Pane. We are aware of this problem and will fix it in a subsequent release." In all, Yahoo Desktop Search is a useful tool, with an approach to desktop search that's different and good enough to earn it a space alongside the other desktop search applications that I've been testing. Horowitz calls it a "living beta," and says that Yahoo has aggressive plans to integrate YDS with other Yahoo products, such as photos, briefcase, calendar and the personalized web search results from My Yahoo Search. "It's a foundation from which we intend to grow, and this beta is intended to open up a dialog with our user base," said Horowitz. Stay tuned. SEARCH SITES PLAY A GAME OF CONSTANT CATCH-UP Saul Hansell, New York Times Last Monday, Google representatives called analysts and reporters to trumpet a new service that searches the transcripts of television broadcasts. Yahoo, Google's rival, got wind of the announcement and within hours, its publicity machine had bolted into action to say it had a similar service in the works. Perhaps the fiercest competition on the Internet these days is among sites offering new ways to search through more information. Yahoo and Microsoft each have hundreds of engineers trying to challenge Google's leadership, and dozens of minor players are trying to find ways of getting their services noticed. A9, Amazon.com's search service, recently sent vans with digital cameras onto the streets of some cities to take pictures of businesses. The photos were later displayed alongside telephone numbers in A9's phone directory. So far, all this innovation has yet to shake Google from its perch at the top of the search market, although its growth in market share has slowed. Google, which reports its earnings for the fourth quarter today and is expected to double its revenue from a year ago, has continued to increase its share of searches conducted over the last year, according to research by ComScore Networks. In November, 47 percent of searches in the world were on sites owned by Google, up from 44 percent a year earlier. Yahoo's sites rose to 27 percent, from 25 percent a year ago. But underneath those numbers, Yahoo is making significant gains, particularly in the United States, with new features that it has yet to introduce to international users. And at a time when Google has stalled in getting some new products to the market, Yahoo has been methodically working on a master list of projects: first, core Internet search, then shopping search, local search and next travel search, according to Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, an Internet news site. He said Google had been more erratic. "Yahoo says, 'Where is the mountain? Let's climb it,' " Mr. Sullivan said. "Google says, 'Maybe we want to go up the mountain and maybe we want to go surfing.' " In the United States, Yahoo is gaining on Google. Yahoo's share rose to 35 percent of searches in November from 29 percent a year earlier, according to ComScore. During the same period, Google rose to 38 percent from 37 percent. And Yahoo is receiving acclaim for some of its innovations, like local search that allows users to see a map that pinpoints the location of the area or business they are searching for. "Each one of our new products can bring in new users who rediscover the core product we offer," said Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president for search. A study of consumer behavior by Keynote Systems showed that while Google remained the top search engine, ranked by the perceived quality of customer experience, both Yahoo and MSN were closing the gap. Mr. Sullivan said he believed that over the last year Yahoo had focused on improving its core search service, while Google's management was preoccupied with its elaborate stock offering. "The biggest thing that slowed them down was the I.P.O., which took a lot of energy from the top," he said. And even before the stock offering, Google appeared to be distracted in its product development plans, Mr. Sullivan said. "The bigger problem with Google is that they will pick some idea, deliver a first version of the product and move on," he said. He noted that most of their trumpeted new services - like Google news; Froogle, its shopping service; and Gmail, its e-mail service - are all still beta services, the industry term for preliminary test offerings. Gmail, indeed, is still available to users only by invitation nearly a year after its introduction. Marissa Mayer, Google's director for consumer Web products, said those services had kept the beta label because there were important features that the company had not yet been able to add. Even so, each of the services has been improved several times, she said. "It's hard to argue that we have dropped the ball on any of the major services we have released," she said. "They just move at different paces." Moreover, she said, Google users have come to expect the unexpected. "There is more creativity involved in our process here," she said. "And isn't that more fun and more interesting? We respond not only to competitive pressures but also to internal ideas." Yusuf Mehdi, the Microsoft corporate vice president who manages MSN and its search effort, said he was encouraged that Yahoo's share of searches in the United States increased over the last year. "I think there is a lot of room to improve the customer experience and you can change share with better experience," he said. He also argued that Google had lost its way. "There has been so much innovation in other areas - like photos and news - that they have not moved as fast in core search as I would have thought," Mr. Mehdi said. Microsoft's test search site (search.msn.com) has a few innovations, like the use of content from its Encarta encyclopedia and a function called "search near me" to find local listings. But Mr. Sullivan said that so far Microsoft's results did not have the quality of Google and Yahoo and were more open to manipulation by site owners. Mr. Mehdi said that Microsoft's formulas were improved each week, and that its main MSN site would soon be ready to replace the search technology from Yahoo. Behind all the jockeying for position in the search engine business, however, it is still not so clear how people decide on which search engine to use. Microsoft, for example, historically has gotten a large part of its traffic because it installs MSN as the default home page for the Internet Explorer browser. And today, many search specialists say that the differences between the various search engines are much smaller than a few years ago, when Google was clearly superior to the competition. "If you slapped the Yahoo logo on the Google results, a lot of people wouldn't know the difference," Mr. Sullivan said. And some observers wonder if the intensity of competition, particularly between Yahoo and Google, may have its own distractions, leaving both companies vulnerable. "There is so much tit-for-tat between Yahoo and Google when they match each other's futures, that they are leaving an opening for things they are not watching," said Seth Goldstein, the chairman of Majestic Research, a firm that studies online consumer behavior for investors. He noted a lot of innovation among smaller sites in using blogs and other methods to associate, or tag, Web pages with information about their content. "A lot of the real innovation is happening under the radar," he said.
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