Microsoft promises 'search 2.0'

Microsoft is re-launching its search engine, promising to make search simpler, and aiming to overhaul Yahoo.

Re-named and re-branded Bing.com, the search engine will go live first in the US and launch in beta elsewhere.

Google has more than 64% of the search market in the US, followed by Yahoo at 20% and Microsoft at 8.2%.

Bing offers to make search more relevant by understanding the intention of searches, and grouping more related information to the original query.

For example, searches for a product will also bring links to reviews, accessories, and online shops, as well as information about the item.

Searches for flight information will pull schedules and times from websites, as well as linking to hotels and weather.

Microsoft wants to reduce the amount of clicking a user has to do to find specific and related information.

Paul Stoddart, Microsoft UK search lead, "Forty percent of search queries go unanswered. There is something missing here and a big consumer need."

He added: "We can see it in the logs [of searches]. When searching using existing search engines I have to keep re-querying things - adding more words, clicking on a site, going back because it is not the right site, and ultimately abandoning their queries."

He added: "We are pulling information that we know people use every day."

He said Microsoft was hoping to build an "emotional connection" between users and its search engines, as well as brand loyalty.

Bing has a much softer, less clinical feel than previous Microsoft search engines and rivals, with a daily changing backdrop image.

"Google haven't been able to innovate a lot of the UI (user interface) because they have to display their ads as that's how they make their revenue. We can try things a bit differently," said Mr Stoddart.

Users are also able to save their searches to avoid having to remember on which site they found a particular piece of information.

Microsoft is forming partnership with a host of different online services which Bing can then trawl to aggregate specific information around searches - such as flight deals, reviews and holidays.

Mr Stoddart said the UK version of Bing was launching later than the US because Microsoft was busy finding the "best of breed" in web services specific to the UK that it could add into search engine results.

"People keep building global search engines but doing something for the UK is important," he said.

He denied that Microsoft's goal of overtaking Yahoo lacked ambition.

"Second place would be a great place. And once we're in second place we will go for first place.

"Microsoft has a great tradition of coming from behind."

Wiping data 'hits flu prediction'

Forcing Google to delete user data after six months could dent its ability to predict pandemics such as swine flu, said the search giant's co-founder.


Larry Page said he thought more debate was needed around the issue of storing user data.

The European Commission wants data ditched after six months but Mr Page said there were benefits to users.

"More dialogue is needed [with regulators]," he told UK journalists at a Google event in Hertfordshire.

Data clash

He said Google's ability to plot and predict potential pandemics would not be possible if the firm had to delete search data after six months.

"When we released data about Mexico flu trends we had a whole debate," he said.

"We were worried we would cause panic. But we decided the benefits outweighed the cost."

Mr Page said deleting search data after six months was "in direct conflict" with being able to map pandemics.

In a demo to journalists, Google showed that it had been able to spot a potential pandemic ahead of government agencies because it was using search data.

On its website about spotting flu trends, the firm says: "Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and pandemics."

Mr Page said the less data companies like Googe were able to hold the "more likely we all are to die".

The European Commission has argued that holding on to search data runs the risk of third parties being able to build profiles of individuals even when some identifying information is deleted.

In September 2008, Google said it would anonymise data after nine months following pressure from Europe on the issue. Previously it had kept data, including IP addresses and search terms, for 18 months.

European advisers recommend that search engines should not keep data for more than six months.

Previously, Google argued that it had to keep data for longer to comply with requests for help from law enforcement agencies.

Google apology for slow service

Google apologised for what it called a "traffic jam" that resulted in slow service or even interruption on the internet search giant's main page.


Gmail and Google's news site were also reported as "sluggish" or unavailable to millions of users for about an hour.

This is not the first time the company has faced such problems.

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our traffic through Asia," said Urs Hoelzle, a spokesman for the company.

"As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions," he said. "We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and 'always on', so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens.

"We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again," said Mr Hoelzle, Google's senior vice president of operations.

Sympathy

The outage has called into question the reliability of web-based services.

Google's "efforts to have some of their services, in particular their apps, and to a less extent Gmail, treated as serious business services that one can use instead of locally installed and maintained apps could be seriously undermined by a major outage like that," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research.

"This is bad news for Google's efforts to build up Apps, and to a less extent, Gmail, as critical business tools. If the mighty Google can stumble, then who can be trusted?" Mr Gottheil told Computerworld.com

Other industry watchers say the interruption might cause businesses to reconsider using these services.

"Maybe companies that are thinking about a cloud strategy - such as Google Apps - need to look into backup clouds" said Sam Diaz, a senior editor at technology news site ZDNet.

On the microblogging service Twitter the service failure became a major topic of discussion.

"Funny how something we lived without for the longest time is suddenly something we can't live without," tweeted simonnet.

While k_sasha tweeted "Sympathies to the Google servers. Happens to everyone. But this is why the world needs more than one search engine."

Napolebsis posted "The Google outage endorses my recent decision to move some services back to offline apps."

This is not the first time that Google has had technical problems.

In February 2009, Google's Gmail service experienced a breakdown leaving millions of people worldwide without access to the free web-based e-mail service for a few hours.

In January, the internet company was hit by technical problems resulting in users being unable to access search results.

Sites fail age verification check

Children's charities are backing a plan to make web retailers ensure young people cannot buy age-restricted goods.

A private members bill going through the House of Lords is calling for it to be mandatory for web retailers to adopt age verification systems.

The bill on age-checking has the backing of charities who say it is too easy for children to buy alcohol, knives and violent video games online.

A check on twelve sites found that thorough checks were not being done.

No tests

The Online Purchasing of Goods and Services (Age Verification) Bill has been proposed by Baroness Massey and calls for "robust" checking systems to be used by any site selling age-restricted goods.

These systems should go further than just making customers tick a box, it said.

The age-checking systems would have to be used if one of 20 separate products were sold including knives, alcohol, tobacco, age-restricted video games and DVDs, solvents and spray paints.

Trading standards officers from Greenwich Council carried out tests on a number of websites to check their age verification processes.

In a supervised test, a 16-year-old bought pre-paid credit cards and then went online to see if he could buy age-restricted goods with it. The credit card was registered with the minor's real date of birth and address.

The teenager managed to buy knives, drink, and 18-rated DVDs and games from 12 separate online retailers.

Oddbins, one of the sites visited, said it was aware of the tests and that it welcomed the second reading of Baroness Massey's bill.

"We do take this matter seriously and are investigating procedures that may assist us in ensuring that sales of alcohol are to over 18s only," added a spokesperson.

Debenhams, which sold knives to the teenager, said it had a "very clear policy" on the issue of selling knives online.

"Customers who visit Debenhams' website pages where knives are for sale are made aware that these are age-restricted products and should therefore only purchase them if they are over 18," it said in a statement.

"Debenhams would never knowingly sell knives to anyone under the age of 18 years old," it added.

Only three of the retailers asked for the teenager to confirm his age at the time of purchase. He got round these by lying about his age. The other sites simply said that buying the goods was a declaration that he was the right age to buy them.

"Although a small sample, our findings from this operation seem to show the danger to which young people can be exposed on the internet," said councillor Maureen O'Mara, Greenwich Council's cabinet member for neighbourhood services, in a statement.

Greenwich Council has written to all the web firms involved in the test.

"Retailers' increasingly successful efforts to control the sale of age restricted products over the counter on the High Street are being seriously undermined by their failure to take similarly effective steps to limit sales of exactly the same items on the internet," said Zoe Hilton, a policy advisor for the NSPCC speaking on behalf of the Children's Charities Coalition on Internet Safety.

The Coalition, which includes Barnardo's, the National Children's Bureau and Action for Children, said a precedent on age-verification systems had already been set with gambling sites.

Google boss won't quit Apple job

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says he will not resign his Apple board position despite a government inquiry.

The Federal Trade Commission is looking at a possible breach of antitrust laws given Mr Schmidt's directorships at Google and Apple.

Both companies have competing browsers and phone operating systems, leading to possible conflicts of interest.

But Mr Schmidt told reporters: "If there are issues on competitiveness, I recuse myself."

He also said that it is well established that he leaves the boardroom whenever the discussion has anything to do with the iPhone.

When asked if he had considered resigning given the recent FTC interest, Mr Schmidt replied "it hasn't crossed my mind."


"Antitrust devil"

Mr Schmidt's comments to news organisations, including the BBC, came ahead of his address to shareholders at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

During that briefing he also said he did not think the fact that Google and Apple share directors was a problem.

The role of Arthur Levinson, a former chief executive of Genentech, who is also on both boards is part of the FTC investigation.

"From my perspective I don't think Google sees Apple as a primary competitor," said Mr Schmidt.

Google's legal team also told journalists that it did not see any conflict of interest.

"The law is clear that there is a safe harbour under the Clayton Act for companies that don't have overlapping revenue in different areas, and we're comfortable with that position," said the search giant's legal counsel Kent Walker

One shareholder attending the annual meeting did not seem to agree.

Speaking on behalf of the federation of labour organisations known as the AFL-CIO, Brandon Rees challenged Mr Schmidt to resign from Apple's board to avoid further government investigation.

"There is nothing to gain and a lot to lose. We don't want Google to become an antitrust devil like Microsoft did," said Mr Reese.

Mr Schmidt said he did not want to comment on any discussions or "rumours of an investigation" and that his presence on both boards was "both legal and proper."


"Killer app"

Turning to the health of Google, Mr Schmidt told shareholders that despite the economic downturn, this was a good time to invest in innovation.

In the first quarter of 2009, the company posted its first revenue decline in consecutive quarters since going public nearly five years ago.

"Companies that invest in innovation in the downturn emerge stronger than their cost-cutting competitor.

"The success of Google will ultimately be determined on our rate of innovation," said Mr Schmidt.

One major area of investment and growth for the company remains search.

Mr Schmidt said it is "still the killer app" especially on mobile phones were "more people are accessing the web through their thumbs."

Recent figures show that Google accounted for 63.7% of all US searches and 97.5% of mobile phone searches.

"Information is what we do. Doing it right and doing the world's perfect search engine remains very very difficult," said Mr Schmidt

To that end he underlined that Google had made 350 improvements in search in the last year alone.

Marissa Mayer who is the vice president of search products told shareholders "we are making the reinvestment in terms of improving search.

"We have all kinds of different ways we use our large market share to our advantage to make our service even better.

"Google today is better than yesterday and Google tomorrow will be even better.

"There are actually changes going on this afternoon like there are almost every day," said Ms Mayer.

MS Windows 7 goes on public test

A release candidate of Windows 7, the next major release of the world's most popular operating system, goes public in trial form in the next week.

Microsoft is hoping it can avoid the negative press that surrounded the launch of Vista, the last major Windows release, almost three years ago.

Windows 7 has been designed to be compatible with Vista so users do not have to invest in new hardware.

A commercial release of Windows 7 is expected in the next nine months.

A test version of Windows 7 will be available to developers from Thursday, while the public can try it out from 5 May.

John Curran, Microsoft UK's director, Windows Client Group, told BBC News that "shortfalls" in the Vista release had caused problems for some users.

"There were challenges on hardware and application compatibility with Vista in the first couple of months - and that has left a little bit of an aftertaste for a segment of people."

When Vista was launched many users expressed frustration that the operating system did not work with all types of existing hardware and peripherals, or programs used commonly on PCs.

And a Vista compatibility programme for hardware proved to be confusing and, in some cases, somewhat misleading.

Mr Curran said Microsoft had "learned lessons" and had been working with partner developers to ensure the same mistakes would not be repeated.

Windows 7 will also have "comparable system requirements" to Vista, which should mean that if your PC is capable of running Vista it will also run the new version.

Negative

Mr Curran said Vista had proved to be a success for Microsoft, despite the negative press that surrounds the operating system.

"Vista is the fastest selling operating system of all time and, in percentage terms, enterprise moved to Vista faster than it did to XP [an earlier version of Windows]," he said.

He said satisfaction surveys for Vista showed 90% of people were either satisfied or very satisfied and 85-90% would recommend it to a friend.

Microsoft embarked on a major advertising and marketing mission to improve the image of Vista after the muted reaction around its "The Wow starts now" campaign.

While Vista was released five months after the release candidate was made available, Mr Curran said Windows 7 would only be released when it is ready.


Bottom line

"Obviously in these times everybody is keeping an eye on the bottom line, but we are certainly taking a longer-term perspective here and always have done with Windows franchise.

"The timeline stated all along is that we are targeting Windows 7 within three years of of the launch of Vista and that would be the end of January 2010.

"We feel quite confident we are on trajectory that will deliver on that promise. But the exact timing will be based on quality."

Windows 7 promises a major usability improvement on Vista, and a simplification of security measures which caused frustration for many users.

Mr Curran said Windows 7 would build on the security improvements in Vista, which have seen a fall in the number of malware attacks and critical vulnerabilities identified.

Many beta testers of Windows 7 have reported that it is faster than Vista, especially in terms of start-up and shutdown sequence of the computer.

Mr Curran said that the Microsoft Windows team had been poring over every aspect of the operating system to make improvements.

"We were able to shave 400 milliseconds off the shutdown time by slightly trimming the WAV file shutdown music.

"It's indicative of really the level and detail and scrutiny on Windows 7."

A version of Windows 7 will also be available for netbooks, but with some caveats.

The Windows 7 Starter Edition will have limitations on how many applications can be used concurrently on a machine in order to preserve performance.