Revamped MSN Search (soon)

My buddy Martin over at BA-Insight (who incidentally kicked-off a great new blog on enterprise search) sent me a link to this article on CNET about comments Bill Gates made during a media briefing in Sydney Australia regarding the new revamped MSN Search capabilities Microsoft is set to release in July. Here are some interesting yet not surprising quotes from the article.

“Microsoft’s chairman told a media briefing here that the company had “several milestones with its search site” on the way.”

“In July, the format of the site will change–and so will the quality of what you get–and the way it’ll look is dramatically improved,” Gates said. “It’ll be later this year that we actually roll out what’s entirely our own back-end driving the search”.

Microsoft had been doing linguistic research for more than a decade that “actually lets us parse and understand documents,” he said. “That’s where you can bring in the idea: Don’t show this person a restaurant if it’s not nearby (or) don’t show this person something about…potato chips if they mean computer chips.”

“Gates said the future of search includes personalization, understanding local information and having the ability to analyze semantics of a document, browse databases and attach domain knowledge.”