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August 15, 2003
MSN Developing Its Own Spider
Microsoft, seeing the growing power of Google and Yahoo!, has finally decided to develop its own engine. For years Microsoft has operated its MSN search engine by combining search results from third party players such as Overture, LookSmart and Inktomi.
Microsoft is obviously concerned about Yahoo!'s acquisition of Overture and Inktomi, giving them unprecedented power over MSN's search results. In response, MSN has recently begun building their own crawler called MSNBot, which has been spidering the Web in beta form at least since April. It has also been reported that MSN has dramatically increased its development staff in recent months. Before you get too excited, realize that you cannot submit directly to MSNBot yet, and its results are not served on MSN or any other public engine at this time.
Clearly, Microsoft is planning to attack Google and Yahoo! head-on by leveraging its powerful financial and marketing muscle. However, building its own competitive search engine from scratch this late in the game will be no easy task, even for Microsoft. Yet, many critics never thought Microsoft could effectively compete in the Web browser market when Netscape had an 80-90% market share and Microsoft was starting from ground zero. As many of you know, within a few years those numbers were reversed with Microsoft Internet Explorer commanding more than 90% of the market and the once mighty Netscape struggling to survive.
Apparently, Microsoft's decision to build its own engine was its second choice. It has been rumored that Microsoft made a private, informal bid earlier this year to purchase Google and was declined. Shortly after this, MSNBot came on the scene.
Besides needing its own crawler, Microsoft needs a pay-per-click engine to compete. LookSmart is the obvious choice. It would not surprise me if MSN tried to acquire LookSmart later this year. Since LookSmart already has a working crawler-based engine, WiseNut, purchasing them would give MSN a leg up in both paid and crawler-based results. Frankly, I'm surprised that Microsoft has not already made a move to purchase LookSmart so that it might at least leverage some of WiseNut's technology as a starting point for its new crawler. It is equally surprising that they waited so long to even consider acquiring their own search engine technology. Perhaps they just like to do it the hard way.
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