RSSMicrosoft Preps MSN Search Overhaul
By David Worthington | Published March 29, 2004, 5:21 AM
Microsoft's MSN business unit is slowly lifting the veil off of its clandestine search strategy. During his keynote last week at the Strategic Account Summit, Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of the MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform division, revealed three new services: MSN Newsbot, MSN Blogbot and MSN Answerbot.
MSN will launch Newsbot and Blogbot by the end of this year, while Answerbot -- an Ask Jeeves-like natural language interface for search results -- will go live at a later date.
The MSN Newsbot aggregates news from 4000 sources worldwide, personalizes its display and learns to recommend relevant links by using cookies. In November, BetaNews learned of an earlier UK-only beta test of the bot. Since that time, however, the beta program has opened up to users of MSN Sandbox - a place to try out the latest MSN technologies.
There are more treasures buried in the sandbox. According to Microsoft, MSN Blogbot scours through the Net to produce blogs as relevant search results in response to customers' search queries. Redmond is billing Blogbot as a first-of-its-kind service and claims that no other search engine can provide such results.
However, a variety of RSS news feeds and blog search engines, including Blogdex and Blogdigger, have been available for quite some time. The ability to search through blogs is also an existing feature of some mainstream search engines.
To make its search engine "blog-friendly," Google purchased Pyra's Blogger.com in February 2003, and has since modified the way its indexing works. In addition, many blog authors in communities such as Blogosphere frequently cite each other blogs. To make this possible, Blogosphere offers a "Trusted Blog" search tool.
Eventually, customers will be able to query MSN's Answerbot search engine using natural language questions. Microsoft has not yet determined a date for when Answerbot will launch, but MSN product manager Karen Redetzki promised that the engine will leave Ask Jeeves in the dust.
Although work has already begun to draw attention to these services, the centerpiece of MSN's push into the search arena is a fully redesigned algorithmic search engine. An early beta of the engine's interface launched in February, but did not include the "live" version of Microsoft's newest algorithms.
Not to start a flame war... but the Newsbot did find something nice. Very much worth a look imo. Its a step in the right direction
http://www.computerweekl...;liFlavourID=1&sp=1
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|Microsoft admits they missed the boat on search. Microsft's current search engines prove that, as usual, they will look out for their pocket before the customer's wants and needs. Google is light years ahead of MS, and spurned a buyout offer. Microsoft will now attempt to throw money at search tech until they finally figure out that no one cares and everyone is still using Google. They will try and spread FUD about Google and maybe claim that SCO has a patent on all search technology. Google will survive in spite of this and everyone will move on. Now, can we not have more useless stories about MSN search?
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|Why does BetaNews articles cover Microsoft like this? IMO 90% of all articles here are Microsoft Ads.
Please! Come on dudes! Tell me..
Because I (for one) haven't seen ANYTHING creative coming out of that company since its incarnation.
Face it brothers! This lazy monkey only copies his smart fiends - and how hard is that really?
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|Give it a break man, no one wants yet "another" Microsoft vs. Whatever case. Just got another one of those of the front page.
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|You know, you're right. I'm looking over at the side of the page and there are five of them right now. It does seem to be overkill! Unfortunately MS has learned nothing from it's past and still seeks an "all Microsoft, all the time" world.
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|Me neither. I just want better articles. I already have Microsoft Press News; I don't need no clones.
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