On the rebound from Yahoo, Microsoft buys into semantic search instead

Davey Winder
Friday, 04 July 2008 03:33

Your IT - Home IT

Whichever way you look at it, two things leap from the page:

Microsoft has made a good move in thinking beyond the Google approach to search, it is refreshing to see some action rather than reaction coming out of Seattle once more.

Ultimately, it is a futile exercise. Google has got search wrapped up very nicely thank you, along with all the advertising revenue that brings. The leftover scraps are devoured by Yahoo! There is just too big a gap for Microsoft to even begin to build a bridge across as far as search is concerned.

So it is almost certainly too little too late for Microsoft, but as any number of industry commentators have said to me in the last 48 hours 'what have they got to lose?' Who knows, in five years we might be looking back to the summer of 2008 and talking in terms of when semantic search was born...