SearchMax

I’ll never forget watching Charlie Rose interview Bill Gates in May of 2004. Bill Gates was asked about the Search Engine market and Microsoft’s roll in Search. I do not remember the exact answer but it was agreed that the top search engines included Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. No surprise there but what caught my attention was Gate’s uneasiness when talking about search and Google. I have been to presentation on Microsoft’s campus where the Microsoft employee who presented purposefully did not mention the competition, as if saying another companies name was toxic. All that it did was ruin the credibility of the presenter. The presenter was not the founder of the company. So when Bill Gates looks uneasy about the competition it usually means that he is focused on beating that competitor. He does not like to lose.

Now what does this have to do with the MSN beta search engine. At first glance the MSN beta does not come close to Google or even some of the other search engines. It does have some nice new features (Asking questions or phrases to get an answer and a few others) but it is still a long way from matching or beating what is on the market.

So Google or the other search engines should have nothing to worry about….well today that may be true, but one to three years from now that may be another story. When Microsoft and their founder put their minds to something they usually win.

Remember when Windows NT was first introduced, NT was known as Nice Try, but after a few new releases and a couple of years, NT became the dominant server operating system on the Intel platform.

So do not count Microsoft out, look for Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft to continue to invest and improve search, with a handful of other vendors to emerge in this space with clustering and other technology to improve the users experience.

The real winners will be the users and software companies that can build tools to integrate these search technologies to better improve life and business processes. With so much information on our desktops, corporate intranets, and the web, we will all be better off regardless of who “wins” the search wars.

More on search integration tools later……

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 13th, 2004 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.