Allan Maurer
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC—Microsoft’s newest products, the search engine Bing, Windows 7 and its Silverlight media player are garnering much more favorable attention than the company received in recent years. Bing may not be a Google-slayer, but it is gaining market share and offers useful new features, Windows 7 has received good reviews and Silverlight helps online video match bandwidth to delivery quality.
Cliff Reeves, general manager of Microsoft’s Emerging Business team, tells TechJournal South that its search engine entry, Bing is getting good reviews. He admits it sometimes does not return quite as good a result as Google, a result of the length of time Google has been doing it, “Which is one of the reason’s for our deal with Yahoo,” he says.
Reeves, who has been with Microsoft since 2001, leads Microsoft’s work with the startup and investor community. He recently led the development of its BizSpark program, which gives startups access to Microsoft’s software.
Reeves is one of more than 75 top executives, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and Internet gurus slated to participate in TechJournal South’s Internet Summit Nov. 4-5 at the Raleigh, NC Convention Center. Speakers and panelists from Huffington Post, Twitter, Digg, comScore, Salesforce.com, and Pandora, among others, will participate. For more information see: www.internetsummit.com.
Reeves says the idea behind Bing is to innovate a “discovery engine.” One of its most valuable features, he says, is its ability to “Drill down into Web sites and extract a second level of information.” That can be especially useful in certain categories such as searches about celebrities, product information, retail stores, travel, dining, and entertainment,” he notes.
“The ability to dig deeper into a collection of sites and bring up the most commonly requested information, such as a UPS service number, adds color and value to the search result,” he says.
Bing’s display of image search results is also different than Google’s and some users prefer it. It also works well searching on certain topics, Reeves notes. “If you’re searching for cameras, for example, you immediately get the form factor (with an image search). You can confirm your choice rather than hoping the term you used is right. It’s incredibly powerful for some things.”
Reeves says the Microsoft engineers looked at ways to change the user experience with search by asking questions such as, “How often do users click the back button?”
It added features such as the ability to mouse over a search result hit and bring up a preview rather than just an abstract. “It’s a continual attention to the details of what people do with search,” he says.
The stakes are high, since search engine advertising is one of the bright spots in the Internet marketing space. “Search is lucrative and that is a major motivation,” says Reeves. “It’ been only incrementally innovative in the last ten years. So let’s take it to the next level of information available in search results. Catgorize, previews, user reviews, styles and so on.”
The idea is to provide more and more rich perspectives on the underlying search results, he says.
Farecast, now Bing Travel, is garnering praise, he says. “It gives you the kind of insight to decide, should I book now or wait because fares are declining?”
While Bing may not be challenging Google for search dominance just yet, Reeves says, “Nothing works like competition. We haven’t vaulted into first place, but we’re definitely willing to put some effort in and we don’t think the last word on search is close yet.”
Even small things such as getting cleaner on Microsoft’s branding of its search engine help, he says. “Bing is a compact name with a certain resonance. But it’s a matter of plugging away at this and we’ll continue to do that with inspiration and a lot of perspiration,” he adds.
Windows 7, which TechJournal South will be previewing next week in a review, is being well received and accepted, especially compared to the Vista launch.
Reeves says he’s also a fan of Internet Explorer 8, which offers some unique features such as Web slices that will allow a user watching an eBay auction to place it on his toolbar where it flickers when a change occurs so he does not have to continually go back to eBay.
Silverlight, the company’s media player, is gaining traction as more content providers use it (such as Netflix). Reeves notes it has some “nice features.” One is that it degrades or improves content speed to dramatically improve a streaming media experience, although the Netflix version currently only adapts to lower bandwidth.
Online: www.internetsummit.com
© 2009, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
