Microsoft Found the Tool to Compete With Google – Semantic Search

It seems that everyone has already grown accustomed to the idea of search engines market completely dominated by Google. But at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Search, Portal and Advertising Platform Group, has made a statement showing that at least the software giant sees a possibility to change the situation. And the change is in the field of better user experience based on behavioral targeting and semantic search technologies. Currently the share of Microsoft Live Search in total search queries is only 10% and this share is supposed to grow if the users are offered true value by Microsoft when it comes to search experience. And now understand what exactly Microsoft is going to use the recently acquired Powerset for - Redmond’s company is going to compete with Google in the search engines market.

The idea that Microsoft has is in the fact that a search engine that wants to be truly useful to searchers should actually understand what every particular user wants to find (not just some pages that are supposed to be relevant for the majority of users). And to understand that the search engine should know more about the users by remembering and analyzing what this particular user searched for in other queries. Right now Microsoft only keeps information for one previous search performed by a user but the plan is to extend this to include more search queries and hopefully understand what user is actually looking for.

Microsoft statistics shows that currently half of search queries processed by search engines are lengthy 30-minute search sessions where a user researches the information on a particular subject, checking various websites from the search results and refining the search query to get better results. If a half of the web population actually spends this much time in search sessions, this definitely is a very promising market. So this is the area where Microsoft sees true potential: if a user is involved in such an in-depth research, various search queries a user tries out to get the results needed are supposed to help understand what the user actually needs and provide the user with better targeted results.

Along with understanding the search queries better Microsoft is going to use natural language processing (currently applied by Powerset to searching Wikipedia content only) to better understand the content of web pages themselves. And in this manner not only the search engine will understand what the user wants to find but will also know where the content best meets the expectations of this particular user.

But no matter how optimistic and promising these plans may sound like, it is obvious that they will raise privacy concerns. After all, what Microsoft is really planning to do is analyze a user’s behavior for a lengthy period of time and serve this user better targeted ads along with the better targeted search results. And while the more relevant results will definitely be appreciated by any user, the targeted ads will be vied as intrusive without any doubts. And if Microsoft fails at least to allow user to opt out of such handling, it may have serious problems with those users who value their privacy online.

But my major concern about the situation is that Microsoft seems to fail to understand one thing: it is currently only trying to catch up with more successful search engines from Google and Yahoo by improving its own search properties. And while Microsoft may have good prospects to improve their existing search properties and even provide the users with a better search experience than what they now have everywhere, it does not mean that those search engines Microsoft is planning to compete with will remain unchanged and stable throughout all the time it will take Microsoft to implement its ambitious plans. And I tend to believe that at least Google will continue to research the algorithm and technologies to improve the search experience for the majority of web population (those that already use Google but will probably appreciate it if it further improved as well). So probably by the time Microsoft is ready to compete with Google in its current state, it will already have another (and very different) search engine to compete with instead.