One-on-one with Microsoft V.P. Satya Nadella

Microsoft is going to have some fighting to do to compete with Google, but if any company has the sheer financial muscle to pull it off it’s Microsoft. Here’s what I found in ZDNet.

“Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of search and advertising at Microsoft, discussed how the company plans to improve its market share and improve search for the long haul, shortly before the company launched new features in its Live Search site at a “Searchification” event on Wednesday. [September 26, 2007]

Q: How much of your search traffic is coming from search embedded within other Microsoft internet properties versus people going directly to the main Live.com search page?

A: The search bar on MSN is where we get a lot [of traffic], and we do get even a bunch from people who choose to use us as the default provider on their browser, as well as people who install our toolbar. So, those are the top three sources.

[Q:] Some people have said it’s about one percent of your traffic that comes from people typing in the Live.com web address?

That’s probably true. We’ve not really marketed Live.com. In fact, we’ve really focused, even with this release we’ll be very, very focused on basically having the Live search experience power MSN, and that’s a fairly explicit strategy of ours, if you will, because we feel that that’s the place where we can gain a lot by showing a better search experience, and getting the customers and the consumers who are doing searches with us on top of MSN to do more.”

You can read the full article through ZDNet

I think the question that’s gone unasked in this, however, is what kind of hoops the company is going to want web designers to jump through if their engine catches on. Similar to the way Page Rank suddenly became an issue when Google took hold as a Popularity Based engine, it makes one wonder what kind of keywords and paid help is going to be required to make it for them. Or is this going to be a rehashing of the same things we’re seeing already?