• The New York Times, Wednesday, September 26, 2007 10:46 AM

Microsoft is taking solid aim at a business outside its core competence: advertising. And it is deliberately facing off against a specialist: Google. Chief combatant Brian McAndrews joined Microsoft last month and knows the Internet ad business well, having run aQuantive, the advertising company that Microsoft acquired for $6 billion last month.

McAndrews' long-term strategy boils down to divorcing online advertising from Internet searches. The two have been viewed as a couple, because so many people use portals and search engines as their home base on the Web, but McAndrews says that model shortchanges advertisers and Web publishers. He contends that search engines, which long have claimed credit for sending people to companies' Web sites, do not deserve it all. Microsoft soon will be able to provide advertisers with a log of where people see ads on the Internet before going to the advertisers' Web sites.

Microsoft today will announce a more modest advance: Changes to the MSN Video site that are supposed to make the ads there less intrusive and more ubiquitous. This development is a response to Google's announcement in August that its YouTube site would overlay advertisements on the bottom of some online videos.

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