Microsoft to launch news, blog search services

Expanding its push into the Internet search space, Microsoft Friday said that it plans to launch Internet search services for news and Weblogs later this year.

The new services, called MSN Newsbot and MSN Blogbot, up the ante in the battle for Internet search market share. Microsoft has already said that it is working on its own general Internet search engine, expected to be launched this year, to go head-to-head with Google. The Friday announcements were made at a Microsoft meeting for online advertisers.

“Consumers are saying that they are not finding the results that they want from any search site today. There is  huge room for improvement in the search space,” said Karen Redetzki, a product manager for MSN at Microsoft.

Also Friday, Microsoft said it is working on a natural language search engine, dubbed MSN Answerbot. This service will take questions from users and find answers on the Internet, rivaling a similar service from Ask Jeeves. No release date for MSN Answerbot has been set, but Redetzki said it is about three years away.

MSN Newsbot will gather news from more than 4,000 sources worldwide. The service is being tested at newsbot.msn.com. Google and Yahoo also offer news search services. The MSN Newsbot test version is online in 10 of MSN’s 38 markets today and that number will be expanded, Redetzki said. “We’re looking at worldwide rollouts for all of our search products,” she said.

Microsoft is claiming a first with MSN Blogbot, a service that will let users search Weblogs, or “blogs,” personal-journal type Web pages that have become increasingly popular. Many consumers even use blogs as a news source, according to Microsoft.

MSN Blogbot will aggregate content from hundreds of thousands of Weblogs and index that content based on which Weblogs are most popular and credible, Redetzki said. The service should go into beta soon, and Microsoft plans to introduce MSN Blogbot worldwide, she said.

Microsoft has made Internet search a key investment area and is building its own search engine from scratch. The company’s current search services on the MSN Web site are offered through a partnership with Yahoo.

“Microsoft excels at software issues, and to build a search engine from scratch is a software issue. This is a perfect opportunity for Microsoft to take on this software challenge head on,” Redetzki said.

MSN Newsbot will be the first of the new services to be officially launched, followed by MSN Blogbot and the general search service based on the newly developed Microsoft search technology, Redetzki said.