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Microsoft is searching for an answer to a tough problem.
It’s far from being the leading search engine — which means its far from the billions in annual revenue online ad revenue that flows to Google and to a lesser extent Yahoo.
And as browsers are looking to become more important than operating systems, Microsoft need to find a way to be something more than a perpetual online bronze winner.
So it’s not surprising that Microsoft will soon be releasing a new search engine to replace Live.com — currently being tested as Kumo and rumored to be released as Bing.com. The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will introduce its new contender on Thursday at the All Things D conference in San Diego.
But getting people to switch isn’t going to be easy. Microsoft’s own research reveals that people spend as little time thinking about what search engine to use as they do deciding what route to take to work or whether to brush their teeth before sleep.
But there is some hope — because of the odd conundrum where many people say they are satisfied with search even though they aren’t. For instance, while some 65 percent say they are satisfied with search engines, that number plummets to less than 40 percent when people are asked, for instance, if they think they’ll get a good result for a query about something local to them.
That’s why Microsoft evangelist Stefan Weitz thinks there’s room for Microsoft to improve.
“The most popular feature in search is the back-click,” Weitz told Wired.com in a briefing.
Call it the Gmail effect — people thought online email was just fine, until Google came along and gave people gigs of disk space, organized emails by conversations and let people send big attachments. Soon Yahoo and Microsoft followed.
Weitz gave Wired.com a look at some of what Microsoft found when it when “back to the data” — namely Live.com search results — in order to make its search good enough to make users turn to it when it comes time to find stuff online.
Some 25 percent of clicks on search results led to a click on the back button within 30 seconds. Some ten percent of clicks are users looking for the second page of results, and another 14 percent are users trying again with different terms.
Only some 27 percent of searches lead to satisfactory answer not requiring a click, a satisfying search engine result or a happy ad click, according to Weitz — who says if that’s the case for Live.com — it’s going to be similar for Google and Yahoo.
That means there’s room for search engines to help users refine their queries or suggest better answers.
Microsoft is also seeing that users are increasingly turning to general search engines for specific tasks, even when there are already specialized tools for such searches. For instance, users are going to Yahoo and Google and typing flight booking information directly into the search box there, rather than going to Orbitz or Kayak.com or Travelocity.
Online search sessions can also turn out to be quite long — meaning that there’s not a single question and answer. For instance, users spend time much of their time with search engines engaged in long research and discovery sessions, and could use some help with organizing those results, Weitz said.
Think of shopping for the best new GPS unit and the cheapest place to buy it online, finding the best local dry cleaner for a fur coat, and researching one’s symptoms and possible remedies.
While those all sound like good insights, Microsoft’s changes will need to be perceived by consumers as something major — something big enough to make them think to switch. Incremental improvements in suggestions and layout have not done much to help Ask.com or Yahoo.com, even for the six months it takes Google to mimic those changes.
See Also:
- Microsoft Aims Search Guns at Google With ‘Bing’: Advertising Age …
- Microsoft Internally Testing New Search Service dubbed ‘Kumo’
- SeeqPod Seeks New Life at Microsoft
- Microsoft Adds More Perks to Live Search
- Microsoft Gives Up on Book Search
- You Can’t Pay People to Use Microsoft Search
Source: Ryan Singel
