Who is MSN search's target competitor?

• Jul. 28, 2003

Back when we first noticed the MSNbot crawling, we began to speculate what Microsoft was up to.  After all, the majority of the world knows that when Microsoft puts its collective mind to it, there isn't much competition standing when the dust settles.

Normally, Microsoft doesn't say who they are "going after".  Generally, they enter a market and dominate it without much fanfare, other than the competition crying, "Monopoly!".  In this case however, MSN executives have announced that Google is their target.  But is this really the case?

After all, while they can compete with Google's search algorithm, what other features does Google have that Microsoft wants to dominate in?  Not too many.  Google has news, images, shopping and groups.  Pretty much every portal has that.  So why make such a bold statement about Google?  And where's the profitability in going after a competitor whose index is largely free?

My theory is that Google is the short term target.  Microsoft wants to dominate in free or organic search.  Once they do that, I think internally they've already set their sights on Yahoo!

Yahoo! offers all the same services as MSN.  It's portal based and aimed at internet users by offering a full suite of services such as news, image and multimedia index, online gaming, online dating and so on.  But Yahoo! has much more brand recognition than MSN.  Yahoo! also recently bought Overture and their 2 crawler based engines, plus they own Inktomi and its index.  Therefore Yahoo! offers the most threat to a new full service MSN.

I think in the end, MSN has to focus more on Yahoo! and target their customer base if they truly want to win in the search engine wars.  Because as we've learned, there is a large group of web users who are more concerned with getting all the services they want, such as getting their daily news online than relevant search results.

Rob Sullivan
Production Supervisor
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning
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