Microsoft promises to get radical to beat Google

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 1 May 2008 at 11:59

The head of Windows Live search has promised radical changes to Microsoft's search technology in a bid to overtake Google, in an exclusive briefing with PC Pro.

After years of apeing the look and feel of Google search, Microsoft's Brad Goldberg says the company will have to take more chances if it wants to dent its rival's enormous lead in the search market.

"Because we're such an underdog and have the need and ability to take more risks, we're going to have to do more radical things around user experience," Goldberg said.

"The focus over the last four years has been to catch up on the basics over [search] relevance. For me, it's about what we do from here," he added, claiming the transition will be similar to the move from DOS to Windows.

Goldberg wasn't willing - or perhaps able - to elaborate on Microsoft's more radical plans, but he said the company would aim to broaden the scope of search engines. "People are [currently] using search as a navigation tool," he claimed. "People are going to a specific site, exiting search, and searching in that particular site for information. Search could be a lot better than it is today."

Windows Live enhancements

In the meantime, Microsoft has made several incremental improvements to its existing search technology.

Perhaps the most impressive is the new Video search, which offers in-line moving previews of the videos when you click over the movie's thumbnail on the search page. The preview isn't just the first few seconds of the clip: Goldberg claims software developed by Microsoft Research automatically selects the highlights from the video, by looking for loud explosions or intense action scenes, for example.

The company also claims to have improved the size of its image search index, meaning results appear more quickly than before, and users don't have to click to the next page to get more results - the results page simply continues to grow the further you scroll down.

Another new feature for the UK is xRank, an interactive celebrity league table that ranks stars based on their current web popularity - not entirely dissimilar to Google's Trends.

xRank appears at the top of the search results when you search for a celebrity on Microsoft's list, and provides news links, photos and videos of the chosen star, as well as links to related stars.

On a more cerebral note, the first fruits of Microsoft's partnership with the British Library are beginning to appear, with 30,000 19th century titles now available from Live Search Books. The books are being painstakingly digitised by a team at the British Library in London - click here to read our behind-the-scenes feature on the project.