Customer Focused … Humble … Under Promise/Over Deliver …

These are some of the key cultural traits the Web Search team here at Microsoft tries to live by.  Boy, were we surprised to wake up yesterday to a bunch of press saying things like “Microsoft:  Give us Six Months to Beat Google” and “Microsoft: We’ll Beat Google at Its Own Game”.  What’s up with those headlines?  They were crafted from an interview with Neil Holloway; he clarifies his position on John Batelle’s SearchBlog. We on the Search Team also want to clarify our position:

We believe that search is in its infancy.  We believe there is massive opportunity to improve every aspect of the search experience including:  basic web relevancy, new types of media, refining and interacting with your results, leveraging search server infrastructure to provide new services that were never before imagined, and so much more.  We are committed to building the world’s best search engine which helps you get your answers as quickly as possible – and we are excited to spend many years continuing to innovate on our customer’s behalf.

When you talk about basic web relevancy, our customers report that we’ve made some great progress over the past year, and I know that our research and engineering pipeline is overflowing with intriguing ideas that we will test and release as they’re ready.  Certainly newer areas of search like desktop search and mapping are areas in which many reviewers and bloggers believe we have some best-in-class features.  Next week Christopher Payne, VP of Search, will be in San Diego at ETech showing some intriguing improvements to our service, we hope these continue the trend.

That said, we won’t try to predict the progress of our competitors and so we won't forecast when we might take the lead, but this is a long term game and we are committed to helping drive the next wave of innovation in search for our customers.

Ken Moss
General Manager Web Search