Microsoft Exec Explains Search Remarks

On John Battelle's Searchblog...  From his comment:

You may have seen press reports and blogs attributing comments to me regarding innovation in the world of search following a recent meeting I had with journalists. Unfortunately, the comments attributed to me do not give an accurate reflection on a long and detailed discussion and I would like to set the record straight. I did not say that we would be ‘twice as good as Google’. What I did say is that we are committed to investing in R&D aimed at providing a search service, initially in the US in six months, that performs better than the current industry wide standard of one in two urls being connected to the subject of the original query. I also said that our aim is to perform as good, or better, in that respect than Google. This is a long term goal. I did not put a date to it as this is work in progress.

The second point I made during our discussion is that we aim to make search a more holistic, integrated and personal experience. This is what our customers tell us they want. In the coming weeks, we will be able to share some new work that we hope will delight our customers and move towards the experience they are looking for.

We respect Google as a competitor. It is an amazing company and should be recognised for its innovation in the search category. However, we know that there is a tremendous opportunity to improve the search experience still further, because many questions go unanswered today. We want to deliver a service to our customers that sets new standards and we are committed to long term investment and innovation to meet the challenge.

Comments

[/pd]

"that performs better than the current industry wide standard of one in two urls being connected to the subject of the original query."

thats calls for balls. - I wish there were more MSFT'ies to back him on that - then Searc space will become really really interesting !!:)-

[web20guy]

Microsoft is being lazy here. Here is what they must be doing:

1. Rebrand msn search, and maybe spin it off.
2. share revenue with users for clicks, immediately. users understand that this will add up to decent amounts soon.
3. every search, shamelessly proclaim "x million dollars distributed so far" like mac d x million burgers sold
4. dont give google time to react. first, they CANNOT share revenue with users bcos the market will kill them and larry and sergey will drop in the forbes list. if they do start sharing revenue, you have already won the game bcos u have turned the tables!

[Chetan]

we will be able to share some new work that we hope will delight our customers and move towards the experience they are looking for.

It took more than 12 months to enlarge the size of query box on search.msn.com. It didn't take much time for you folks to get rid of the user friendly Tab completion of email address on http://login.passport.net/uilogin.srf?lc=1033&id=2 Is is the result of some disgruntled employee or what ?