Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer vowed recently that in the next 6 months, MSN Search will serve up results that are as relevant as the Google results. According to an article in ZDNet, Ballmer added that, “Search has more relevance than just the desktop. It’s important for people who search a corporate network. We’ll use search to peer into a range of business applications which would allow multiple applications to be searched simultaneously.”
Ballmer is referring to MSN’s newest Neural Net & “RankNet Technology, where current reports of renewed relevance in search have been exciting. In a Microsoft white paper about gradient descent, they outline some of the mathematics behind the newest MSN algorithm.
One of the problems that MSN has faced and still faces is its interface. Most people go to MSN.com only to find a search box hidden at the top among an entire page of distraction hiding the search interface. Few people even know that a cleaner MSN Search URL exists.
The other question that arises is “Just how relevant do you have to be?” Some argue that all of the current search engines are now relevant and now it’s just a matter of marketing to get the word out and claim to have a better mousetrap. They say that “perceived relevance” is what is important.
No matter whether perceived or real, relevance is something that the big search engines will be fighting over for years to come. The biggest benefit will be to the search consumer, so in this case, competition can only make the mousetraps better.
