Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Group, predicted that the next few years will bring graphical interfaces and other new user experiences to revolutionize
search as we now know it, and suggested that Microsoft has dazzling innovations under development in its labs.
The lofty remarks made during Berkowitz's keynote address at
Search Engine Strategies were sobered by other news released yesterday. Hitwise's latest monthly search stats show Google grabbing nearly 65% of all search activity and the only major engine with
a year-over-year share gain for March, as compared to a decline for Microsoft--with an anemic share of less than 10%.
Percentage of US Searches Among Leading
Search Engine Providers |
Domain | Mar-07 | Feb-07 | Mar-06 |
www.google.com |
64.13% | 63.90% | 58.33% |
search.yahoo.com | 21.26% |
21.47% | 22.30% |
search.msn.com | 9.15%* | 9.30%* | 13.09% |
www.ask.com | 3.48% | 3.52% | 3.99% |
Note: Data is based on four
week rolling periods (ending 3/31/07; 2/24/07; 4/1/2006) from a sample of 10 million US Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and
MSN Search |
Source: Hitwise |
Berkowitz, who a year ago was unveiling the redesigned Ask.com before departing for Microsoft, said Microsoft is focused on getting the basics right before it can launch more
innovation. He said the emphasis will be on integrating search into Microsoft's other products--Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces.
While destination search is important, he said, Microsoft
will devote equal attention to convenience search integrated into other experiences, such as gaming.
Berkowitz declined to comment on rumors of a deal with Yahoo to shore up search share,
saying only that improving organic is his objective. He said the value proposition might be enhanced by providing such features as a universal ID.
Category Upstream Traffic
from Search Engines and Google, March 2007 |
Category | Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, Mar-07 | Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Search Engines, Mar-07 - Mar-06 | Percent of Category Traffic from Google, Mar-07 | Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Google, Mar-07 - Mar-06 |
Health and
Medical | 43.27% | +2.71% | 28.38% | +9.76% |
Travel | 30.79% | +17.32% | 18.93% | +24.95% |
Shopping and Classifieds | 25.35% | +5.99% | 15.43% | +14.24% |
News and Media | 21.09% | +16.71% | 13.52% | +27.73% |
Entertainment | 21.01% | +12.88% | 12.98% | +24.46% |
Business and Finance | 15.75% | +13.28% | 9.07% | +23.00% |
Source: Hitwise |