By: Svetlana Gladkova

It seems that everyone has already grown accustomed to the idea of search engines market completely dominated by Google. But at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Search, Portal and Advertising Platform Group, has made a statement showing that at least the software giant sees a possibility to change the situation. And the change is in the field of better user experience based on behavioral targeting and semantic search technologies. Currently the share of Microsoft Live Search in total search queries is only 10% and this share is supposed to grow if the users are offered true value by Microsoft when it comes to search experience. And now understand what exactly Microsoft is going to use the recently acquired Powerset for - Redmond’s company is going to compete with Google in the search engines market.

The idea that Microsoft has is in the fact that a search engine that wants to be truly useful to searchers should actually understand what every particular user wants to find (not just some pages that are supposed to be relevant for the majority of users). And to understand that the search engine should know more about the users by remembering and analyzing what this particular user searched for in other queries. Right now Microsoft only keeps information for one previous search performed by a user but the plan is to extend this to include more search queries and hopefully understand what user is actually looking for.

Microsoft statistics shows that currently half of search queries processed by search engines are lengthy 30-minute search sessions where a user researches the information on a particular subject, checking various websites from the search results and refining the search query to get better results. If a half of the web population actually spends this much time in search sessions, this definitely is a very promising market. So this is the area where Microsoft sees true potential: if a user is involved in such an in-depth research, various search queries a user tries out to get the results needed are supposed to help understand what the user actually needs and provide the user with better targeted results.

Spread the word: related/readit

Read the rest of this entry »