Microsoft Advances Search to the Desktop

By David Worthington | Published July 9, 2004, 4:17 PM

As the battle to challenge Google's number one position intensifies, the Web is not enough. In a statement on Thursday Microsoft group vice president Jeff Raikes revealed that the software giant is at work to improve customers' ability to find documents, e-mail and data.

However, there has been confusion in interpreting the nuance of Raike's remarks. Microsoft is not relying solely on the efforts of its MSN business unit to develop an algorithmic search engine. MSN's search engine is not the same as Windows or Office. In reality, the Office Information Worker unit already has its own search engine compliments of the SharePoint team.

Microsoft's intentions may be to place all of its wood behind one search arrow, but for the time being, that is not the case.

"I think most folks are confused and think there is one big MS search engine coming. That's not true at all -- at least not in the short term. Microsoft has multiple teams working on multiple search projects. There's the SharePoint Portal Server team that is continuing to hone its search technology, which is currently used by the Windows, Office, SQL Server and Exchange teams," Microsoft Watch editor Mary Jo Foley told BetaNews.

"Microsoft Research is doing their own search research, with a heavy focus on natural-language interface techniques. Meanwhile, the Longhorn WinFS team also is working on the thorny search problem from the metadata-store perspective. And, of course, there's the MSN Search team working on the new search algorithm that recently debuted in beta on MSN.com," Foley continued.

MSN is now publicly testing an unfinished version of its search engine which returns only the most relevant search results by design.