Microsoft To Unveil New Search Engine, Crowd Hits Snooze Button

Sources say that next week, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, will debut a new Microsoft search engine that sorts your queries into familiar categories such as articles, photos, and reviews. We’re not saying that Google is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but Microsoft is waging an uphill battle with only 8.2 percent of the total search market.

“When a competitor reaches the kind of dominance Google has, it’s almost impossible to catch them,” That’s from Rob Enderle, an analyst at Enderle Group in San Jose, California. “This is really testing whether Microsoft can still do what they did when they were young, which is enter a market from behind and catch up. They haven’t had what it takes to do that for a long time.”

God knows there’s room for improvement in Google’s engine, which consistently doesn’t remember settings or return relevant images. But it’s like Kleenex and Frisbees… a brand name that’s synonymous with the product. Can Microsoft deliver a totally new, innovative engine that we won’t be able to live without?

[Via Bloomberg]