Robert Scoble has a post entitled Search for Toshiba music player demonstrates search engine weakness where he complains about relevance of search results returned by popular web search engines. He writes

Think search is done? OK, try this one. Search for:

Toshiba Gigabeat

Did you find a Toshiba site? All I see is a lot of intermediaries.

I interviewed a few members of the MSN Search team last week and I gave them hell about this. When I'm writing I want to link directly to the manufacturer's main Web site about their product. Why? Because that's the most authoritative place to go.

But I keep having trouble finding manufacturer's sites on Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Relevancy ratings on search engines still suck. Let's just be honest about it as an industry.

Can the search researchers find a better algorithm? I sure hope so.

Here, compare for yourself. If you're looking for the Toshiba site, did you find what you're looking for when you do searches Google ? On Yahoo ? On MSN ?

Here's the right answer: http://www.gigabeat.toshiba.com . Did you find it with any of the above searches? I didn't.

The [incorrect] assumption in Robert Scoble's post is that the most relevant website for a person searching for information on a piece of electronic equipment is the manufacturer's website. Personally, if I'm considering buying an MP3 player or other electronic equipment I'm interested in (i) reviews of the product and (ii) places where I can buy it. In both cases, I'd be surpised if the manufacturer's website would be the best place to get either.

Relevancy of search results often depends on context. This is one of the reasons why the talk on Vertical Search and A9.com at ETech 2005 resonated so strongly with me. The relevancy of search results sometimes depends on what I want to do with the results. A9.com tries to solve this by allowing users to customize the search engines they use when they come to the site. Google has attempted to solve this by mixing in both traditional web search results with vertical results inline. For example, searching for MSFT on Google returns traditional search results and a stock quote. Also searching for "Seattle, WA" on Google returns traditional web search results and a map. And finally, searching for "Toshiba Gigabeat" on Google returns traditional web search reults and a list of places where you can buy one. 

Even with these efforts, it is unlikely any of them would solve the problem Scoble had as well as if he just used less ambiguous searches. For example, a better test of relevance is which search engine gives the manufacturer's website for the search for "toshiba gigabeat website".

1. http://www.google.com/search?q=toshiba+gigabeat+website
2. http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=toshiba+gigabeat+website
3. http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/search?p=toshiba+gigabeat+website

I found the results interesting and somewhat surprising. There definitely is a ways to go in web search.

From the press release MSN Launches Paid-Search Service in France and Singapore we learn

NEW YORK — Sept. 26, 2005 — Today, Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the MSN^® Information Services & Merchant Platform division, opened the second annual Advertising Week 2005 in New York City by announcing the official launch of adCenter in France and Singapore. adCenter powers a paid-search service from MSN that provides advanced audience intelligence and targeting capabilities to help advertisers improve their return on investment when it comes to paid-search advertising.The official launch of adCenter in France today and Singapore on Aug. 31 follows successful pilot programs in both countries. U.S. testing of adCenter is set to begin in October.
...
Powerful campaign management tools and deep audience intelligence unique to MSN make it easy for advertisers to optimize and refine their campaigns to reach a specific audience. Some of those tools include the following:

•  Keyword Selection allows advertisers to indicate whom they want to reach based on geographic location, gender, age range, time of day and day of week, and suggests keywords based on the desired audience.

• Site Analyzer assists advertisers by suggesting keywords based on the content of their Web site, rather than on another keyword.

• Audience Profiler provides advertisers with an expected profile of those customers who are most likely to search for specific keywords.

• Cost Estimator helps advertisers remain within their budget by estimating rank, traffic and cost per month per keyword.

• Campaign Optimization allows advertisers to respond quickly and decisively throughout the campaign to easily refine budget allocations and keywords, as well as apply targeting filters such as geographic, demographic and dayparting.

• Post Sales Audience Intelligence & Reporting provides advertisers with detailed reports on campaign performance and audiences reached including click-through rate, estimated position and spending levels.

"We’re excited by the positive feedback we have received from advertisers thus far," Mehdi said. "The launch of adCenter in France and Singapore is a great first step to delivering on our global vision to connect advertisers to consumers in a much more meaningful way."

In the near future, adCenter will become a one-stop shop from which advertisers can manage all their MSN advertising campaigns, end to end, including display and direct ads. In addition, advertisers will be able to use advanced targeting tools and audience intelligence data to reach their desired audiences across the MSN network. Advertisers interested in learning more or signing up for adCenter can go to http://advertising.msn.com.

Our team got a demo of adCenter a few months ago and it definitely looks like it hits all the right points which is impressive for a version 1.0 offering. Given how much revenue MSN gets from advertising it's good to see us giving advertisers more tools to improve the value to get from advertising on MSN. Based on the fact that competitors like Yahoo! and Google already have offerings in this space, adCenter is an overdue addition to our stable of services.

From Omar Shahine's post mail.start.com we learn

Well, we launched Kahuna Milestone 3 (M3) yesterday with a new URL (http://mail.start.com). We are building Kahuna iteratively, and plan on releasing much goodness on a frequent basis. This is very different from the way that Hotmail and MSN has typically released software, but we feel it’s the best way to achieve success.

As I mentioned recently I've been using the Hotmail beta for a while now and it's a phenomenal improvement over the current version. Below is a screenshot of the beta in action.

If you'd like invites to the beta, you should keep an eye on the Hotmail team's space. You can also find more screenshots of the Hotmail beta on their space as well.

I got an email about Six Apart's Project Comet yesterday and it definitely made me smile. It's good to see more validation of the idea that personal publishing (weblogging) should evolve into personal self expression (my blog, my photos, my relationships, my media, etc). This is the same direction taken by services such as MySpace, MSN Spaces and Yahoo! 360°.

Weblogs are replacing the personal homepage and thus to reflect all the facets of one's personality, they need to be more than 'my online journal'. Most of the big vendors in this space have cottoned onto this idea slowly but surely. I wonder when the coin will drop over in the Blogger offices at Google.

I've been participating in the inaugural podcast for the Microsoft Architecture series. From the website

ARCast is an ongoing podcast series created by the Architect Strategy Team with the goal of spawning insightful, enlightening and sometimes contentious conversations about the hottest topics in Architecture today

The topic for the first series of podcasts are the problems facing interoperability in web services today. The participants are myself, Jeffrey Schlimmer, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Roger Sessions, and Chris Haddad. Most of the discussion has been about adoption of WS-* which even though I work on web services that are utilized by millions of people every day, I've never really found the technologies outside the core XML web services standards (SOAP/WSDL/XSD) to be of much importance to our main scenarios.

Feeding poor people is useful tech, but it's not very sexy and it won't get you on the cover of Wired. Talk about it too much and you sound like an earnest hippie. So nobody wants to do that.

They want to make cell phones that can scan your personal measurements and send them real-time to potential sex partners. Because, you know, the fucking Japanese teenagers love it, and Japanese teenagers are clearly the smartest people on the planet.

The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it's depressing and not fun and doesn't have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don't know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that -- unless we start paying very serious attention -- it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.

By Joshua Ellis, found via Jamie Zawinski.

A few days ago I mentioned in my post, Microsoft's Innovation Pipeline, that I suspect that a lot of folks at Microsoft will be looking to try something new after working on large software projects that in some cases have taken 3 to 5 years to ship. I personally have had conversations with half a dozen people over the last month or so who are either looking for something new or have found it.

In his post, Something New, Derek Denny-Brown writes

What kept me at Microsoft, and what I will miss the most, is the people. I worked with such diverse collection of wonderful people... mostly. Not that you can't get that elsewhere, but the 'individual contributors' (as they are called at MS) are really one of Microsoft's assets. I felt like a I was leaving my family. I have worked with some of these people for my entire time at Microsoft. That is a long, and intense, time to build a friendship.

I've had almost everyone I know ask me "why I are you leaving?" Some factors: Whidbey is basically done, as is Yukon. Microsoft definitely is more bureaucratic that it used to be, as well. Mostly though, it was just time to move on. I was presented with an opportunity that fit my interests. (And no, I'm not going to Google... too big. I decided long ago, that if I was going to leave, I wanted it to be for a small company, something less than 100 people.)

Derek is a good friend and I'll hate to see him leave. At least he's staying in Seattle so we'll still get to hang out every couple of weekends. I didn't try really hard to pitch him on coming to MSN but after a second friend [who hasn't posted to his blog about leaving yet] told me he was leaving the company I've switched tactics. All my friends are getting the pitch now. :)

There are two videos about MSN's AJAX efforts on Channel 9 today.

1. Omar Shahine and team - New Hotmail "Kahuna": Hundreds of millions of people use Hotmail. Here's the first look at the next-generation of Hotmail, code-named "Kahuna."
   
   You meet the team which is located at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus, hear their design philosophy, and get a first look.

2. Scott Isaacs - MSN DHTML Foundation unveiled: Scott Isaacs is one of the inventors of DHTML. He is one of Microsoft's smartest Web developers and built a framework that's being used on Start.com, the future Hotmail, and other places like the new gadgets in Windows Vista. Hope you enjoy meeting Scott, sorry for the bad lighting at the beginning. If you've done any AJAX development, you'll find this one interesting and you'll get a look at some bleeding-edge Web development that MSN is doing.
   

I've been using the Hotmail beta and it is definitely hot. My girlfriend saw me using it and when I told her that was the next version of Hotmail she told me to send hugs and kisses to the Hotmail team. Kudos to Omar, Aditya, Steve Kafka, Imran, Walter, Reeves and all the other folks at Hotmail who're making Kahuna happen.

Additionally it looks like I'll be working on Hotmail features in our next release. So maybe I'll get some of those hugs and kisses next time. ;)

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 20, 2005 — In order to drive greater agility in the execution of its software and services strategy, Microsoft Corp. today announced a realignment of the company into three newly formed divisions, each of which will be led by its own president.  The Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division will be led by Kevin Johnson and Jim Allchin as co-presidents; Jeff Raikes has been named president of the Microsoft Business Division; and Robbie Bach has been named as president of Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division. In addition, the company said Ray Ozzie will expand his role as chief technical officer by assuming responsibility for helping drive its software-based services strategy and execution across all three divisions.

The company also announced that Allchin plans to retire at the end of calendar year 2006 following the commercial availability of Windows Vista™, the next-generation Microsoft^® Windows^® operating system....

Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division

Johnson will succeed Allchin, taking ownership of the Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division, which comprises Windows Client, Server and Tools, and MSN^®. To ensure a smooth transition, Johnson and Allchin will serve as co-presidents until Allchin’s retirement next year. The new division’s mission is to enable exciting user experiences and drive customer value through continued innovation in the software platform and software services delivered over the Internet.

"We are focused on creating exciting user experiences and enabling developers to build great applications with the combination of software and software-based services," Ballmer said. "Our MSN organization has great expertise in innovating quickly and delivering software-based services at scale. The platform groups have great expertise in creating a software platform and user experience that touches millions of people. By combining these areas of expertise, we will deliver greater value to our customers. David Cole, senior vice president, will continue to lead MSN, reporting to Johnson.

It seems I was wrong about how long it would take MSN to become more like Windows. The fun thing about Microsoft is that just when you think you have the org chart figured out, we have a reorg.  :)

In a recent interview with Business Week, Microsoft's CEO stated

We certainly have the best pipeline of new innovation [over the next 12 months] we've ever had in our history.

I was thinking about that line on my drive back from work yesterday and I think he has a point. Over the next year or so Microsoft is going to ship Windows Vista, Office 12, IE 7, Visual Studio 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, SQL Server 2005, .NET Framework v2.0, Windows Communications Foundation (Indigo), Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon), Xbox 360 as well as the next iterations of various offerings from the MSN division including Hotmail, MSN Spaces, MSN Messenger, MSN Virtual Earth, Start.com, etc. That's a lot of stuff and is probably more stuff than has ever shipped in a 12 - 18 month time period in the company's history.

I suspect that one of the interesting consequences of this will be a significant diffusion of talent across the company and perhaps across the industry. A lot of people have been working on a big pieces of software for several years and will be looking for something new. The most restless have already started moving around (e.g. I went from the XML team to MSN, Joshua went from the XML team to Internet Explorer via the Passport team, and Michael went from the XML team to XBox). I've started having more conversations with folks interested in a change and I expect this will only increase over the next 12 months. Definitely interesting times ahead.

On an unrelated note, I have updated the track of the week from my high school days on my space. Just click on the play button on the Windows Media player module to hear this week's track.