This session featured When you’re at 10% share in the US, that’s the challenge. Obviously you need a search engine to satisfy users’ needs. But to put it in a numeric perspective, look at the number of unique searches in a month. About a quarter of unique searchers/month are using Live—that’s our goal. I feel we’ve finally reached a level of maturity where we can compete with the best, if you will. I read the Image search, and the scratch pad have gotten good feedback. Later today we’ll blog about it. We’ve quickly responded to face recognition on search.
The Mobile. We have a great app—Windows Mobile, as well as in broswers. Our synonym database is a great asset. We have a variety of horizontal and vertical integrations as well as ourcore investment.
Do you see either one of those as the stronger way people are going to go? We’ve had horizontal for years and it hasn’t taken off, but you’re setting the pace in 3D. Will that be your direction?Clearly, that’s part of our strategy. I think images and video will become pretty mainstream. At the same time we’re not in just to win or get our fair share in just the verticals. How ‘bout on the advertising side?
On the advertising side. adCenter, we got it out last year. We’ve been in for a year, so we’re pretty happy with that. Based on audience feedback, we’re looking at quality and usability. Our last update had a lot of innovation, things that updated those issues—to be able to do campaign uploads, management, and put a lot of emphasis on basic usability.
Beyond that, one of the things that we started doing—contextual ads on our network. It’s in a pilot program now, yielding pretty good results for us. The center is search. It’s one of the ways that we’ll solve the traffic that our advertisers expect.
There should be no confusion in terms of our entire destiny and ability to make headway in search—it depends on keeping pace with MSN as a portal—search, Messenger, Hotmail.You’ll see us innovate with these services. We want them to use MSN as the brand & destination. I’m sure other people are working on the clarity.
How do you prepare yourself for this job?As you change from one area to another, I’ve probably worked in every part of our business. There’s always the thrill of getting to a new domain and a new audience. Thinking about an expert crowd [before starting this venture]—I think all my fears will come true. The best way to energize myself is to jump into something new. The last month has been refreshing, meeting a new set of people, challenges. At the end of the day my job is about the great people that we have all over the globe & to be able to enable them to do their work. We have some very smart and capable folks. My job is to be able to take out friction and enable our team to do their best work.Audience Questions What are the main things you want to be doing over the next year? Five years?
We want to show some innovation that stands up to increase engagement. The crux is how to take searchers already using Live search and get them to use it more. We want to look at abandonment rates, be scientific and data driven about that.
I think one of the great opportunities we have is in MSN where we know the audience & search—information supply—can be done in a lot more contextual way. A lot more contextual search innovation—“convenience search” (as Berkowitz calls it).
The longer term: is the best sort of search interface just query and results? Hey, queries are not done in isolation. They’re being done because of some sort of context or past. Personalization is one angle at it. That’s one place where I think that there’s a ton of innovation on the user experience side.
I know that you’ve offered your corporate customers discounts on products to use search. Can you extend that down to personal users?I’ll take that back to my business colleagues.I’m also curious about Amazon A9 that came back to MSN (the street view one).
We definitely believe in and are huge on 3D. But we did have street level innovation. We’re opting for the 3D oblique and birds eye view. MSN had its own street view (Danny: Let’s segue into the Google Street View controversy.) Privacy is about how much you put the user in control—making connections, disclosures.
I think the end users will vote. We experimented with a street-side view. In this case, I think user experience counts in terms of user adoption. We’re expanding that now.
Do you see a way of trying to do the control before it’s reported to you? Will we be able to block ourselves out?This is one of my nightmares come true [referring to being asked the question, I think]. At the end of the day, I imagine that as you have control. Why do we treat government agencies differently? The benefit I’d raise is broadly outweighed by any privacy concerns, that would win out. If not, we’ll get to some sort of equilibrium. In the last month, we’ve seen Google Universal search roll out. What’s your take and will Live go that way?
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