Microsoft's New Search Engine: What's The Advantage?

The Wall Street Journal and the All Things Digital blog both broke stories this week indicating that the long anticipated new search engine from Microsoft will likely be unveiled this week. Internally known as "kumo", the new search engine is a revamp of the current Microsoft Live Search engine.

The re-branded search engine is widely rumored to be name Bing and Advertising Age reports that that Microsoft is putting $80-100 million into an advertising campaign to displace Google in people's minds as the synonymous term for internet search. For comparison's sake, it's estimated that Google's advertising budget last year was $25 million. But will people bing it instead of googling it?

As reported by Alex Patriquin and compete.com, MSN/Live Search's year-on-year market share fell to 6.2% of the total search market, this despite being the default search engine for Microsoft's Internet Explorer. So clearly either technical innovation or better branding is needed.

The All Things Digital blog story links to three reported screen shots from pre-release versions of the new search engine, working under the kumo name. The screen shots show a clean sparse results pages organized by the type of content that the search result represents. For example, one screen shot shows a search for pop star Taylor Swift. The left side navigation pane shows the search results organized by categories images, songs, lyrics, biography, music, albums, videos. This sounds similar to the search engine claims that Microsoft was making last year when it bought the semantic search engine Powerset.

It's unclear that automated organization of search results based on an understanding of the clusters of types of results can be leveraged into a sustainable competitive advantage for Microsoft and enable it to eat away at Google's 73% market share. Can these features be duplicated by Google? Are these features significant enough to convince users to change which search engine they use?

One aspect of the new Microsoft search offering that has yet to be tested or proven is just how much of the web has its search infrastructure indexed. Warm and fuzzy names, default search engine status, sparse layouts, and new organizing techniques for search results aren't worth anything if the information is not in the Microsoft databases to be found in the first place.