Microsoft’s nascent site, live.com, made yet another milestone today, announcing a new, polished search engine. The new search engine release comes only about a year after Microsoft’s much touted MSN search. MSN search was supposed to be the Google and Yahoo killer, but it was never able to live up to its hype.
Windows Live, together with Office Live are Microsoft’s response to the new Web resurgence currently under way. Dubbed Web 2.0 (some would argue that the moniker is already dated), the new Web renaissance gives users a number of new features such as interactivity, multimedia, on-demand facilities, and real-time presentation of material from various sources, known as mashups. It is, by some accounts, slated to be the future technology that would finally unseat the well-entrenched Windows desktop and other Microsoft productivity suites that currently run on most computers around the world.
It is believed that Microsoft threw quite a bit of money into MSN search, so logically one must assume that the new live.com search is based on the same repository, only with a slick interface. Even with all the progress Microsoft has made to carve out a larger Web market share, it still has a long way to go to match the power and the appeal of Google and Yahoo.
If history is any indication, Microsoft could have that chance to do unto Google what it did with Netscape during the browser wars era. But it is still too early to predict the outcome of Web supremacy. The Web has proven to be too fickle when it comes to brand loyalty and popularity.
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Give a few Sats