Bronte Media

Kevin Delaney and Robert Guth have written a fantastic article on MSN search over at the WSJ. The article charts the decline of MSN search share after introducing its own algorithm.

To be fair its search share has been on a steady decline for five years. And Yahoo, which replaced Google’s with its own, has seen a similar trend, although has held the line in recent times.

Yusef Mehdi tried to put on a brave face: “It couldn’t be further from the truth than to say that we haven’t made fast progress,” says Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft senior vice president who is heading the search effort. “We are very close to closing the gap” in the relevance of MSN’s results versus those of Google, he adds.”

Note the first sentence does not directly reference search share. And the second says that they are close to closing the gap, not actually closing the gap! You have to love it!

The article then documents a gossipy tidbit about Microsoft getting Keynote Systems to mute the findings of its search study.

Building a better mouse trap in search is very tough. It is not good enough to be better, you have to be noticably better to the consumer. Only a leap forward, such as looking at links as votes the first time Google did, is noticable. MSN or anyone else has not come up with such an improvement. The chances are they wont, Google or Yahoo have an equal or better chance of doing so, and throwing billions of dollars at the problem wont work.

Either way, I hope The Economist had a chance to read the article. It might have helped them before writing the utter crap they did about Yahoo.