Staying Alive

The Good Offers both no-frills and info-rich, customized search. Related results are relevant. The Bad Looks a lot like Google; video search still in beta
The Bottom Line It may not score originality points but does make for a solid search experience

tag. –> If you can’t beat them, copy them. At first glance, that seems to be Microsoft’s strategy to capture more of the search market. On Sept. 11, the software giant officially released from testing a trio of search services: Live Search, Live.com, and Live Local Search, which share a striking resemblance to Google’s own offering.– if (!window.OAS_sitepage) { var BW_site; // use for new ad site var BW_page = “/tech”; var OAS_listpos; // use to restrict the number of available page positions document.write(”); } //–>!– OAS_AD(’Middle’); var printPos = “Middle = pos9, in story(300×250), tc_general_9.htm”; var checkAd = (!adcheck)?false:debug(); //–>

Unlike MSN.com, Microsoft’s longtime search site, Live.com has the streamlined look of Google’s homepage. The basic site is a bar with several words underneath linking to, among other things, an image search, a Web-only search, and a map program featuring 3-D aerial shots similar to those found in Google maps.RELEVANCY.  It makes sense why Microsoft (MSFT) would release a platform similar to Google’s. Despite having 465 million unique viewers on its MSN site each month, Microsoft has lagged a distant third behind Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO) in the search market. Nielsen NetRatings puts MSN’s share of the market at just 9.6% for July, 2006, the last month for which the company has statistics. During that same period, Google controlled 49.2% of the market, with 2.78 billion searches. Yahoo came in second with 1.35 billion searches, representing 23.8% of total queries.

Sid Parakh, an analyst at McAdams, Wright, and Ragen, says computer users were visiting MSN for its content but then leaving when they wanted to find more information. “Microsoft realized that, even though they have a lot of traffic on their Web site, people were going to Google or Yahoo for searches,” Parakh says. A major reason for the search switch was relevancy. Computer users who searched MSN would sometimes receive different, perhaps less targeted, results than when they searched Google and Yahoo, Parakh says.

The new engine, Live.com, has resolved these issues. A recent search for “cars” on Live Search and Google yielded many of the same results in the top 10, including cars.com and a stock analysis of Avis Budget Group (CAR). Similarly, a simple search for a word or two also yields results with relevant ways to refine the search. For example, a search for “home” would bring up suggested queries such as “home loans.”

Stay alive…