Use Microsoft search and win - an iPod

Fairfax

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Microsoft is dangling prizes made by arch-nemesis Apple to entice Australian web surfers to give its online search products a second chance.

Through its Australian joint venture with the Nine Network, ninemsn, Microsoft recently completed a full revamp of Live Search to improve results and integrate video, images, news and maps into search queries.

But in what is perhaps a sign of desperation given Google's growing market share dominance, ninemsn is running a new Live Search promotion - Secret Search - offering surfers the chance to win prizes including the iPod Nano, Shuffle and Touch just for conducting searches.

A Microsoft source said using competitor products was frowned on at Microsoft and the company was offering large discounts on Windows Mobile-based smartphones to dissuade staff from buying iPhones.

At ninemsn, staff are forbidden from using Google search.

At the entrance to Microsoft's Zune headquarters in the US there is an "iPod Amnesty Bin" for staff to throw away their iPods. The words "bite me" are plastered across the bin below a picture of an Apple with bites taken out of it.

Ninemsn's head of Live Search, Alex Parsons, said if the Zune music player was sold in Australia it would have been offered as a prize instead.

"Where we don't have a great product or we don't have a product at all there's no internal edict that says we're not allowed to use competitor products," he said.

Following the recent upgrades, Australian Live Search Maps now includes comprehensive business listings from Yellow, driving directions and a unique new "birdseye" feature allowing users to explore Sydney, Gold Coast, Wollongong and Hobart from the sky at 45-degree angles.

With Google Maps and the old Live Search Maps, users could only view top-down satellite images.

The video search component has also been significantly revamped, drawing on content from all major video sharing sites. Video clips can be played directly from search results simply by hovering the mouse over them, removing the need to click through to an external site.

As a novelty, a new search feature called Celebrity X-Rank ranks celebrities based on how many times they are searched for by Australians.

According to Nielsen, Google search has a unique Australian audience of 9.7 million users, up from 8.5 million a year ago. By comparison, Live Search has just under 3 million users, up slightly from 2.7 million a year ago. Yahoo!7 search has dropped from 1.5 million to 1.4 million users.

Parsons acknowledged that Google appears unstoppable today but said ninemsn was focused on the long-term.

"I read about when Hoover was vacuum cleaners - i'd like to see what sort of market share Hoover has now against Dyson and some of the German brands," he said.

"I'm not going to sit here and tell you we're going to win this in the next year or two years - that's not my objective."

In the US, Microsoft is pouring money into search in an effort to gain on Google. Overnight it announced the acquisition of Powerset, which has developed innovative "semantic web" search technology that analyses the meaning and context of keywords when bringing up results.

Meanwhile, Adobe announced this week it had worked with Google and Yahoo to give the search engines the ability to look inside files encoded in Adobe's flash format. Search engines have traditionally ignored text contained in these files. 

- © Fairfax NZ News