Four years ago, shortly after I'd written about a new search service called Google, a Microsoft manager called me for a briefing on MSN Search. "I don't know what the big deal is," he said at the time. "Google looks pretty much like a straightforward keyword search." Microsoft, on the other hand, felt the key to searching was shopping. MSN would do standard searches, but its orientation was to help people to buy things. From a business standpoint, that made sense: MSN could gain revenue not only from advertising, but also by sorting clients' rankings in its searches.
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