REDMOND, Wa. – Microsoft Corp. is expected to show a new version of its Internet search engine next week, in a renewed effort by the company to compete against Google Inc., people familiar with the matter say.
The software giant, these people say, plans to demonstrate its new search engine publicly for the first time at D: All Things Digital, a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., put on by the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp. The new search engine, which has been in private tests within Microsoft for months, is designed to better organize search results for consumers to minimize the amount of time they spend clicking around Web pages looking for information.
Meanwhile, Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday described plans to improve its position in the lucrative search market by answering more Web search queries with specific data like addresses, photos, and other real-world information rather than links to Web pages.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.
For months, Microsoft has been testing a prototype of the new search engine, code-named Kumo, with Microsoft employees. The technology is designed to cut down on the length of typical Web searches by grouping the results of a search for, say, a particular model of car into helpful categories like parts, used car listings, online discussion forums and videos showing the vehicle. Microsoft is planning a major advertising campaign to promote the new search engine and has hired the agency JWT, a unit of London-based WPP PLC, to develop a campaign for the product, people familiar with the matter say.
Microsoft is planning a major advertising campaign to promote the new search engine and has hired an agency to develop a campaign for the product. Above, a worker walks past a building on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., last month.
Yahoo, at a press conference in San Francisco, said it is trying to improve answers to search queries with technology that better classifies data scattered throughout the Web, such as places, reviews, addresses and dates. It has begun doing so through computer-analysis and tapping specific feeds of information that it gets from partners. Some of the technology is already is already being used in an early form on Yahoo. When a user searches for “Wyclef Jean,” Yahoo determines that the query is for a musician and displays audio clips of songs in addition to Web pages.
Larry Cornett, a Yahoo vice president, showed off other possibilities it may roll out in the coming months, including an enhancement to its image search service that, for a search for a destination like Paris, shows photos of other destinations, like Madrid. The other surfaces reviews for queries it determines are restaurants.
Google has a big lead. On Monday, research firm comScore Inc. reported that Microsoft and Yahoo both saw slight month-to-month dips in their respective shares of the U.S. Internet search market in April, with Microsoft at 8.2 percent and Yahoo at 20.4 percent. Google edged up 0.5 percent to a 64.2 percent share of searches during that month, comScore estimates.
The situation is one reason that Microsoft and Yahoo executives are still pursuing a potential partnership, despite Microsoft’s abandoned effort to buy Yahoo last year for about $45 billion. The two companies have been discussing a complex deal in which Yahoo would sell its Web search and search advertising technology to Microsoft, in exchange for an upfront payment and some share of the revenue of the search ads it shows on Yahoo, according to people familiar with the matter.
The status of the talks remain unclear. A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment, as did the Microsoft spokesman.
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