Agence Consulting and Development Web

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft has been bloodied and repeatedly humbled in its battle with Google in online search.

That explains why Steven A. Ballmer, the typically bullish and boisterous chief executive of Microsoft, is speaking cautiously about his company’s latest volley against Google, a new version of its search engine that Mr. Ballmer was scheduled to demonstrate publicly for the first time at a technology conference on Thursday.

“I’m optimistic that we’re taking a big first step,” Mr. Ballmer said in an interview last week at Microsoft’s headquarters here. “And yet I want to be realistic. We’ve got to take a lot more steps.”

There have already been many missteps. Despite investing billions of dollars in its search engine technology over the years, Microsoft has watched Google steadily eat away at its market share. This time it is taking a more precise approach, working to help searchers with specific online tasks. It will back its latest release with one of the biggest marketing efforts in its history. And it has come up with a new name, Bing, that will replace the confusing Live Search.

The stakes for Microsoft could not be higher. Search has become the central tool for navigating the Web, and ads tied to search results are becoming an ever more important piece of the advertising market.

Microsoft is so eager to catch up that it bid nearly $50 billion last year to buy Yahoo, the No. 2 search company behind Google. Mr. Ballmer is no longer interested in buying Yahoo but still hopes the two companies will find a way to team up to take on Google in search, and talks on a partnership are continuing.

For now, however, Microsoft is proceeding on its own. Bing represents the fruit of more than a year of research showing that while users say they are generally satisfied with Web search services, their behavior suggests that they often stumble as they rely on search engines to complete certain tasks.

Those include things like deciding what camera to buy, where to go on a trip or how to better understand a medical diagnosis. Bing offers an array of new features that are aimed at simplifying those tasks, and it is meant to eventually expand to cover more of them.

“We are pushing beyond the way search works today,” said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.

The most noticeable new feature in Bing is what Microsoft executives call a table of contents, a navigation rail that allows users to refine their searches and that changes with each query.

A search for Taylor Swift, for instance, gives users the option to quickly zero in on things like images, videos, lyrics and tickets. A search for Elvis Presley will offer slightly different options — no tickets, but a fan club.

In a search for Honda Civic, the top suggested refinement is the word “used,” but in one for Hyundai Sonata it is “problems,” because search data suggest that those are the most frequent follow-up queries associated with those cars.

In many cases, Bing also extracts information from Web pages and presents it an easy-to-digest format. A search for U.P.S. will deliver a search box to track parcels, as well as a phone number for customer service. A search for “Terminator Salvation” will display movie times at nearby theaters.

Bing also presents more detailed results in four search categories — travel, health, shopping and local. In browsing the shopping area for a Canon camera, for instance, Bing extracts and displays information from reviews covering things like image quality and size.

Bing, which is to be available to the public by next Wednesday at www.bing.com, is not alone in its evolution away from the traditional 10 blue links that search engines have displayed for years.

Google, for instance, has long blended images, news articles and videos in search results, and recently began offering ways to refine searches. Yahoo also presents movie times and is working to extract information like reviews from Web pages. But with Bing, Microsoft appears to have pushed the changes deeper and into more subject areas than its rivals.

Whether that translates into success depends on many unknowns, including whether Microsoft’s search results are generally as helpful as Google’s, as the company’s executives contend.

“There are things where they are going to be superior to Google,” said Danny Sullivan, a search expert and the editor of the SearchEngineLand blog. “But it is not a game changer. The features are not going to instantly compel people to switch.”

Mr. Sullivan said Microsoft’s best hope is that users begin spreading the word to friends about the features of Bing that they like. “That can really resonate with people,” he said. But Mr. Sullivan also cautioned that Google might be able to quickly match anything that Microsoft has done that proves compelling with users.

Others say Microsoft’s biggest challenge may be convincing enough users to give Bing a try.

“There is not a perceived market problem with search that needs fixing,” said Bryan Wiener, chief executive of 360i, a digital marketing agency. “They have a marketing challenge in convincing consumers that there is reason to look beyond Google.”

That is where Bing’s marketing campaign comes in. The company is planning to spend well above $100 million, making this one of its biggest campaigns ever.

When deals with partners are included, like agreements that have already been announced with Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Verizon to give the search engine prime placement on PCs and phones, the marketing effort reaches to several hundred million dollars, according to people familiar with Bing’s marketing plan, who asked not to be named because its details are confidential.

In April, Microsoft accounted for 8.2 percent of searches in the United States, a small fraction of Google’s 64.2 percent, according to comScore. Yahoo’s share was 20.4 percent. Mr. Ballmer is confident that with Bing, Microsoft can begin clawing its way back up the share rankings.

“I hope over the next year we’ll see small results,” Mr. Ballmer said. Mixing confidence with a dose of realism, he added: “Big as a percentage of our share and small as a percentage, maybe, of Google’s share.”

source: NYT