HAHAHAH: MSN Search offically delayed until next year
Quote:
Microsoft yesterday added some features to a search engine it is testing online, but said that the final version of the technology won't be available until sometime next year.
For two years, the company's MSN division has been building a search engine to compete with market leaders Google and Yahoo! MSN had been expected to launch that service by the end of the year and yesterday the technology world was buzzing with rumors that Microsoft would finally stake its territory in the growing search market.
That wasn't the case. MSN made some improvements to the engine it is building, called it a beta release and made it available on a Web site at beta.search.msn.com. Up to now it has made two "tech previews" of the engine available online. The new engine searches through an index of 5 billion Web documents, and is available in 11 languages.
MSN still uses technology from Yahoo! to run its main search site, at search.msn.com, and will continue to do so until it officially releases its own search engine.
And so everyone waiting for Microsoft to enter the search market will have to wait a little longer.
"They're not really doing battle in the search wars with their own weaponry until they put it out on MSN Search," said Danny Sullivan, the editor of the search-focused Web site Search Engine Watch. "They do have their own technology, they just haven't deployed it. Until this is deployed in MSN Search, it effectively is not in front of a public that is going to really care."
Even using Yahoo!'s technology, MSN ranks third in the online search market. In August, Google was the preferred choice of Internet searchers, grabbing 36.1 percent of total searches, according to researchers from comScore Networks. Yahoo! sites had 30.6 percent of searches and MSN had 14.4 percent.
The beta release available today gives an idea of MSN's plans for its search engine, and they include using the engine to promote other Microsoft products. One feature is designed to answer questions using information from Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia.
If a user typed the query "What is the population of Seattle?" for example, the answer will be included in the search results along with links to related Encarta articles, some of which may require a paid subscription to read.
Additionally, MSN is including direct links to songs and other content from its MSN Music store in the results for music-related queries. A user could click the link to hear a sample of a song, for example, and click again to purchase it.
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and so on..........
All I can say is:
2 years
100 Million dollars
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:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh |
