August 22, 2003

Microsoft is "investing heavily" in new Web search technology as an important and potentially lucrative market, Christopher Payne, the company's executive in charge of search, said Thursday.

"On the information side of the house, there's no question that search is the cornerstone of our strategy. We're investing heavily in this space," Payne, a vice president for Microsoft's MSN Internet unit, said at Jupitermedia's Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo. The conference was held this week in San Jose, Calif. He declined to say how much money or how many people Microsoft was investing in the project, however.

MSN, the online unit of leading software maker Microsoft, earlier this year released its Web crawler, MSNBot, which collects the building blocks of information upon which Web search engines are built. In a sign that Microsoft is preparing to put more of its programming muscle behind search services, the software giant recently said it will build its own algorithmic search engine to compete with companies like Google and Inktomi.

Inktomi, which now provides MSN's algorithmic search, was bought in March by MSN rival Yahoo. Without giving specifics, Payne said Microsoft's research department is devoting significant resources to the company's search project. "We think there's massive headroom left in this category," Payne said. "There are a lot of searches that can be better." He added that search represents great revenue opportunities for Microsoft and its advertisers.

About 50 million unique users hit MSN with search queries each month, Payne said. Separately, Payne said MSN is sticking with paid-inclusion partner LookSmart, which allows Web site operators to pay to have more of their pages included in Internet searches.

Source: C-Net News

        

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