Microsoft Live Search Readies for Google Showdown

Microsoft released an update of its Live Search. The revamped Live boasts improved core search technology and more vertical search areas. Microsoft said the changes lay a foundation that will help the company keep pace with the growth of the Web. But will they give Microsoft a leg up over Google?

"We have made dramatic progress in delivering a better search experience to our customers," Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft, said in a statement.

"We know what kinds of things consumers are searching for, and we have invested in those key high-interest verticals, including entertainment, shopping, health, and local search," Nadella added. "With the core platform in place, we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time."

One Query at a Time

The improvements begin with breadth. Microsoft more than quadrupled the number of sites it indexes. According to the company, the new Live Search does a much better job in predicting the intent of the query to return the best results possible results, despite common issues such as spelling errors, punctuation, and synonyms.

According to Microsoft, the new Live Search incorporates more user click-stream data to inform ranking and relevancy processes. The goal is to yield more relevant results across queries, Microsoft said. In addition, Microsoft has focused on vertical search to extract information from across the Web on products, businesses, and celebrities, for example.

Live Search's Answers platform provides specialized responses to queries about specific areas, such as weather, images, celebrities, and entertainment. The Answers content has been more deeply integrated into the main search to add to custom searches such as images and mapping.

Microsoft topped off these changes with a new, cleaner user interface that aims to make the results pages easier to read and use.

A Battle Brewing?

Certainly Microsoft would like to take market share away from Google, but that's a longer-term initiative, according to Alan Weiner, an analyst at Gartner. From his perspective, the goal of the announcements Microsoft made is more along the lines of getting people who have already used Live Search to use it more.

For example, according to Weiner, if you are a Live Search user and you use it 70 percent of the time, Microsoft wants to get you to use it 80 to 85 percent of the time. Likewise, if you go to Live for everything but image searches, Microsoft wants to make images better so you don't go anywhere else, namely Google.

"By spiffing up the algorithm in a way to create greater relevance and creating new verticals, Microsoft wants to get greater buzz going in and among those who use Live Search," Weiner said. "Part of what happens when you do that is you gain momentum. Momentum is what Microsoft needs, in addition to some other things, to compete with Google."

Source: news.yahoo.com