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Microsoft marks out search target

Stefanie Olsen CNET News.com

Published: 29 Mar 2004 09:15 BST

Microsoft plans to introduce a news-aggregation service for Web logs and to develop a social-networking product, a company executive said last Friday.

Speaking at the company's annual online advertising conference, Yusuf Medhi, MSN's corporate vice president of information and merchant services, spoke about the company's "big investment" in search. He highlighted MSN's recent release of a search toolbar for the browser and its new News Search, which aims to deliver more relevant results using personalisation.

In addition, he flagged planned Web log and social-networking products, and said the Microsoft division plans to develop natural language-processing algorithms. This technology would permit visitors to ask questions such as "what's the highest mountain?" instead of using simple keywords.

Medhi declined to elaborate on the upcoming search service, but hinted at some research areas. He said one in two search requests currently go unanswered and that there are a number of ways to improve on that. One is to learn more about the searchers, in order to give better results.

Microsoft's search rival Google has been developing a social networking service, known as Orkut, which it plans to integrate into its search service within the next year.

On Thursday, chief executive Steve Ballmer said he regretted that Microsoft had not spent more on in-house search research and development in the past, but said the company has addressed the oversight and plans to unveil its own search product within the next 12 months.