Stan Beer
Wednesday, 13 September 2006 12:26
Opinion and Analysis
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.
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.