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.

Reason #1: Basic Model

Anti-virus software vendors still rely on yesterday’s methods for solving today’s problems: they wait for next virus to wreak havoc and then produce a solution. That worked for a long time when a virus would take years to traverse world. But in this fast-paced Interet-crazed world we live in today, this type of solution is no longer applicable. Now a virus can traverse world and infect millions of computers in minutes.

In good old days a virus traveled by floppy disk. Put a floppy in your computer and save some data to it and virus would infect floppy. Then unwittingly put infected floppy in another computer and presto new computer would become infected. (I’m skimming over a lot of detail here to make a point). So virus’ progress was slow and steady. Anti-virus vendors had time on their side. They had time to get a copy of virus, dissect it, run it through a series of tests to come up with a signature string (see below for definition), put string into a database of strings to search for when scanning your hard drive (and floppies) and release new database to public. Ten years ago this system worked very well.

But now everyone is connected via Internet. Now, using email as a transport point, it doesn’t take years to gather momentum, instead it takes a matter of minutes. And here is where model breaks. Step back and ask yourself following question: if vendors can catch “known and unknown viruses” as their literature states, how then is it that we continue to have virus problems?

The answer lies in fact that virus authors have been more creative in coming up with new ways to infect and wreak havoc and software industry has not responded in kind, preferring to stay embedded in its old fashioned methodologies.

Why don’t old ways work any more, you might ask? It’s relatively simple. Let’s go through steps.

A virus author unleashes NewVirus via email. He mass mails his virus to thousands of people. Some, not all, unwittingly open attachment thinking it’s from a friend or subject is so enticing that they are fooled into opening it without thinking it’s a problem (cf. nude pictures of Anna Kournikova). The email attachment immediately starts emailing everyone in his contact list and embeds itself into his operating system so that it’s activated every time he turns on his computer.