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Microsoft launches Live.com search engine

Software giant Microsoft officially released September 11 Live.com. After six months of beta testing, Microsoft decided to enter the search engine market and try and enlarge its market share. Nielsen NetRatings puts MSN`s share of the market at just 9.6% for July, 2006, the last month for which the company has statistics. During that same period, Google controlled 49.2% of the market, with 2.78 billion searches. Yahoo! came in second with 1.35 billion searches, representing 23.8% of total queries.

Although MSN is visited by 465 millions unique viewers a month, they seem to prefer the other two search engines for their searches. At first glance it seems like not much is different from the Google site, with a basic look and little information on the page. Microsoft`s senior product manager for Live Search, Justin Osmer, said the design of the site was influenced not by Google, but by what users said they wanted. "I don`t know how much we actually look at competitors, but we ask customers to say what is working for them and what is not," he said.

Features such as personal tags and suggested queries should eventually improve Microsoft`s standing in the search game, says Charles Buchwalter, vice president of industry solutions at Nielsen NetRatings. "The market is far from settled," says Buchwalter. "Despite how much momentum a player like Google has made in the search arena, we are still in the early stages of this battle."