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Microsoft is doing pretty good for itself, even in search. Although they are stuck back in the 1990’s of search technology, they are innovating and trying out new things. Currently based on a mix of studies, MSN + Live, Microsoft has 10% of the search market and are currently, the 3rd most used search engine, behind Yahoo and some un-known company named Oogle or something. :)

They have also been gaining influences and reach, in the search market, over the years. Yahoo is on a steady decline and Oogle :) is still increasing twice the rate of Microsoft.

In addition to all of this, Internet Explorer is the default browser for all PC’s. IE (Internet Explorer) has roughly 46% of browser market-share. [Post script note: According to Net Applications; IE has 71%, huge differences...I'm just not sure which one to believe now. [After some more in-depth research: Hmm, Wikipedia says 71%, MacWorld says 81%, Janco says 73%, IT.. says 73%. So, I guess the rest of my paragraph is totally off base, but I'll keep it up because all of the stats are still showing that IE is losing it's ground; Also, I had a feeling 46% was just too low but most, if not all of the studies that I just mentioned state IE is losing it's market share.]] Just remember in 2002, IE accounted for 85% of the browser market-share. The reason for the sudden decrease was IE’s maverick nature, it rendered code ‘how it wanted to’ and not the way W3C standards intended (that’s the internet coding standards). With that, Firefox, or Mozilla, took the opportunity to continue to abide by the W3C standards and as the internet grew, more and more webmasters just got mad at IE, Microsoft, and just start switching browsers and even promoted it (Firefox).

But with all that said, Microsoft still has 20 times [Post script: Actually it's more like 70-100 times, depending on how much market share you give Google Chrome (Some studies show Google Chrome has only .74% to 3%)] the market as Google Chrome. Chrome sends Google your activity, each and every action, recorded, documented for all Google employees to see. Microsoft is planning on the same thing with IE8 but they have already published papers on ‘Browserank’. The key difference here is that Microsoft will have more data than Google to experiment with and look at. Therefore will be more effective in innovating in this aspect of search than Google (not guaranteed but if I had 20 times the marketing budget than my competitor, I’d be more probable to win :D ).

So, Microsoft is doing good, steadily increasing their search market-share and innovating in new search technologies through browser data but they have one key issue. They have a bad reputation in search. MSN is thought down upon. Live? Not many people really know what it is. Live was a desperate attempt to rebrand their search but it wasn’t very effective. But now they are thinking about rebranding their search with ‘Kumo’, a japanese name for ’spider’ or ‘cloud’.

I think this name is great, especially if they buy out Yahoo! Japanese name, where Yahoo dominates Japan (warning Japanese site, just note the graph, Japanese sites need links too! :D ) with 60% of their search market.

I’m excited for Microsoft. I’d love to see Microsoft rise up against Google, so that we’d have a more balanced search market. Since Google is completely dominate in search (~70% market share, worldwide), webmasters have no choice but to bow down and listen to Google (That is, if you want to make money and get a lot of quality traffic). I think a strong competitor will cause Google to rethink their dogmatic belief about paid links and banning webmasters from their index over a stupid snippet of code, hidden to users.

I wish the best for Microsoft and pray that they offically announce the name Kumo for their search and just call all their search ONE THING, not 4 different names (MSN, Live, Microsoft Search, Kumo). Pick one and stick with it. Run with BrowseRank, your going to change the face of search as we know it.