BeerFiles is a sometimes irreverent blog concerning all things to do with IT, technology, people and the media from the point of view of a hard boiled technology journalist and commentator. Stan has been in the IT game for about a quarter of a century. He has seen and written about the rise and fall of more than a few IT players and made many friends, some of whom he has even crossed swords with on occasions. Everything in this blog is purely Stan’s opinion so if you agree, wish to expand upon, correct a post or tell Stan he’s a clueless know nothing, please feel free.

Windows Live News on the cards?

by Stan Beer

Wednesday, 13 September 2006

I'm having a play with the new Windows Live.com search site and flicking between it and Google, thinking to myself how remarkably similar the sites are in many respects. Like Google, Live Search can handle news queries. So I start typing in news queries for both and then it hits me. Featured Whitepaper 5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support Live.com, like Google (and Yahoo Search) allows users to pull news stories off the web. Since Microsoft is such a copy cat, how far away could the big M be from doing its own news aggregation service and pushing out the news in addition to allowing users to pull it? Google News has been around for some time without any real opposition from another search-based news aggregator. Its spiders are continually crawling news websites in practically every country of the world finding every word that's been written on every news item. Its software filters these items impartially and it has proven to be a popular site. So why not Live News - hey the name resonates from the rafters. The big question of course is what happens to the MSN portal, the world's number 2 ranked website in terms of traffic, and its MSNBC news service? The short answer is nothing. Leave them where they are. MSN is a successful content portal like Yahoo, while MSNBC is a high profile news service which, like other news services, would have its stories aggregated on Live News. If anyone doubts that Live.com is going to get an audience, they may want to take a look at the current Alexa ranking, which currently has it ranked at the number 9 most trafficked website in the world with a bullet upwards - and it's still in beta! It appears that Microsoft may really be on to something with the Live.com search site. There is no doubt that Live.com is not as good a search engine as Google. However, all those years ago inferior technology did not stop that poor imitation of Mac OS called Windows from gaining a dominant market share. No doubt, Google is watching the development of Live.com with great interest.{moscomment} Tags See All Tags Google  Search  Windows  Powered By Joomla Tags Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment!

 

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