Internet Phone Benefits. More than likely you receive many VoIP phone calls in course of a week without realizing it. This is because phone line quality for VoIP is same as traditional phone services. If you are considering Internet phone service, you are making a good choice. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) as it is called is quickly becoming best value for telephone service. Most companies like Sprint and AT&T are already offering VoIP within their internal networks and are starting to offer it as a complete service offering.

How VoIP Phone Calls Work and Voice Quality.

The simple answer is that your voice is digitalized and transported over Internet as well as over phone company's private network using Internet Protocol (IP) service. A broadband phone call happens in real time just like on a digital TV, except you are using your broadband Internet service (DSL, Cable, or Satellite). Traditional phone services use analog, circuit technology. Because of improvements in voice quality and throughput of VoIP, small idependent carriers have already started offering VoIP to residents and businesses. Now most phone companies are using Internet phone technology over their private networks. This means that most of your calls today go over, at least in part, VoIP networks. This change in technology is a major factor in drop in long distance rates in recent years. Now that many phone companies are extending VoIP service to homes and businesses, we can now enjoy additional savings, great voice quality, and great features.

Price.

Microsoft has recently come out with latest beta version of its much touted search engine. Supported by 5 billion indexed pages, it is poised to become one of most powerful search engines in market. Right now MSN is using Yahoo provided search results for queries done through its search page, which it’s planning to change somewhere in early next year with its own. You can check out search engine at http://beta.search.msn.com .

Google’s immense success and profitable business model enticed Microsoft and others to look into lucrative search engine market seriously. Amazon, for example, has recently launched its web search site A9.com. Today, Google carries out almost 50 percent of all searches on Internet. Yahoo with 24 percent of market share is trailing in a distant second place. MSN with 14 percent lags far behind from competitors – a situation, which won’t be very easy to change.

However, Microsoft has a long history of copying booming products; make their replicas some times, arguably, better then originals, and clinch larger portion of market shares. Microsoft has successfully done this to Borland’s dominance of programming languages in early days. The list of victims continued with once utterly popular word processor –WordPerfect, market dominant spreadsheet – Lotus 1-2-3, Novell’s Netware and finally Netscape. Since 90 percents of all personal computers run on Windows, Microsoft gets an extra edge against its competitors, which it’s capable of exploiting very effectively.

What is new in MSN search?

This version of MSN search incorporated several interesting features, which other search engines are lacking at this moment.

Direct answers to plain language factual searches

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Askjeeves has better ability to find answers to direct plain language searches. MSN search has taken this one step further by adding Microsoft's Encarta reference tools to its features. Ask, what is capital of Russia? You will get right answer at beginning of result page. Questions like “What is size of a Blue whale?” also brings in exact answer. No doubt, students will love this feature as it makes a lot easier for them to get specific answers to questions related to facts and figures.

Near me

Microsoft's new search engine includes a ''near me'' button that helps users find websites for a given location. In this release, this works only in United States.