The study shows that the search industry has grown by 41% in July 2009, compared to what it was in July 2008.

Expectedly, Google cornered the lion’s share of the searches conducted. It had 76.7 billion searches which is 67.5% of the total number of searches carried out in July 2009.

Google’s competitors were left far behind. Yahoo! received 8.9 billion searches or 7.8% of the market share. Yahoo! was closely followed by the popular Chinese search engine, Baidu, which received 8 billion searches which is 7% of the market share.

Microsoft’s Bing, which was launched only in June 2009, registered 3.32 billion searches which is a 41% growth compared to July 2008′s volume of searches on Live Search.

Generally speaking, all the well known search engines showed a significant growth in the search volumes they received compared to the same time period last year. Most notably, the Russian search engine Yandex grew by 94%.

comScore has further revealed that the behaviour of search engine users varies markedly from region to region.

They found that Europe accounts for the maximum number of searches with 32.1%, while the Asia-Pacific region follows with 30.8% and North America has 22.1%.

On the other hand, Latin America had the largest number of searches per person. They had an average of 13 search usage days per person in a month, and each searcher conducted 130 searches on an average.

They were followed by Europe which had 117 searches per user and North America which had 12.5 usage days in the month.

The Middle East and Africa lagged behind with only 5.8% of searches conducted worldwide, 10.5 search usage days per person and 97.3 searches per person.

Microsoft Live Search had been losing market share in the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009, but Bing seems to be changing that situation now.

Reports from Efficient Frontier show that ROI received by advertisers has gone up by 43% for Google, and by 24% for Microsoft Bing, but has dropped by 8% for Yahoo!

This is in spite of the fact that the over all expenditure by advertisers on search marketing has gone down by 21% compared to the same time last year.

The amount that advertisers spent on Bing has gone up by only0.1 percentage points compared to last year, but has gone up by 0.7 percentage points when compared to the first quarter of 2009.

In the second quarter of 2009, Bing received 4.5% of ad spend of the clients of Efficient Frontier, while Yahoo! received 20.5% and Google received 75%. At the same time, Bing had 4.1% of the total clicks while Yahoo! had 24.3% and Google had 71.6%

Bing has been doing especially well in the travel and financial services sectors.

The report by Efficient Frontiers also shows that the amount which its medium spenders (between $50,000 to $2,00,000 per month) are spending on SEM has gone up by 5% in Q2 of 2009, compared to the amount spent at the same time last year, but small advertisers (below $50,000 per month) spent only 59% of what they spent last year, and large advertisers (above $2,00,000 per month) spent 78% of what they spent last year. Over all, the budgets have gone down by 21%.

On the other hand, another SEM company reported that large spenders (over $1 million per year) spent 18.77% more than they did last year, while small spenders (below $1 million per year) spent 25.33% less than they did last year.

comScore reports that Microsoft had 8.4% of market share soon after the launch of Bing in June 2009, compared to 8.02% in May 2009. but that figure is still less than the 9.2% which they had in June 2008. This may be the effect of the recession though.

The new platform will be called Bing. It is expected to help users obtain knowledge about their query and thus make smart decisions.

Steve Ballmer first introduced Bing at the D7 Conference held in San Diego recently.

According to the Bing team, four and a half new websites are being created on the net every second, but a large portion of searches conducted still do not produce the results that users are looking for. That is to say, the results obtained do not help users in the process of decision making.

Bing will be endowed with a new set of intuitive tools, along with an excellent search service, which will combine to provide users with results which are far better organized, thus helping them to make better decisions.

Bing will also have features like cash back and Price Predictor, to help users save some money.

Bing will focus on four key areas, viz. making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business.

The brand name Bing will also be incorporated into some of Microsoft’s other services. For instance Virtual Maps and Farecast will henceforth be known as Bing Maps and Bing Travel respectively.

To help users learn more about Bing, Microsoft has started a new website DiscoveringBing.com. Its new Twitter account is @bing.

Whether Bing will help Microsoft to displace Google in the search market only time will tell.

On the 2nd of March 2009, Microsoft’s Search executive, Satya Nadella sent an email to all Microsoft employees, asking them to try out and then send in their feedback on the new test site, Kumo.com.

According to his mail, almost 40% of search queries go unanswered. With a view to improve the search experience and help users accomplish their tasks, Microsoft has undertaken this internal study.

The major difference between Kumo and other search engines will be the way the results query is narrowed down. An explorer pane on the left side of the search results page will give access to various tools, to help users with their tasks. There will also be features like single session history, and hover previews. On the right hand side related text ads will appear. The results in the center of the page will be organized in a way that saves time.

Even thought the test is being conducted internally at present, Live Search issued a statement last week, explaining that they are testing the revamped search engine and will hopefully be able to release it to the general public soon. They have also said that they are still considering whether to rebrand Live Search as Kumo or not.

Zack Stern at PC World speculates that Kumo might be the first major commercially available search engine that can conduct visual searches, that is, it would be able to identify and deliver pictures of certain people or objects or places based on what it “sees”.

It is widely accepted, probably even by the folk at Microsoft, that a mere rebrand will not solve their search-related stories. Their statement on the Live Search Blog indicates that this might be yet another branding exercise. However, that still begs the question why they would bother… haven’t they learnt anything from their last (MSN to Live Search) rebranding exercise?

Americans carried out 13.5 billion searches in the month of January 2009. This figure is 7% higher than the corresponding figure just one month ago, in December 2008.

Expectedly, Google sites were the leaders in the number of searches conducted with 59% share of the market, followed by Yahoo! sites having 15% market share and Microsoft sites having 6% share of the market. AOL and the Ask Network had 3.9% and 3.7% respectively.

Of the 11.7 billion (up 5% from December 2008) searches conducted across all Google sites in January 2009, Google Search accounted for 75% while YouTube and other Google sites contributed to 25% of the volume.

Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search metrics are much more heavily skewed towards their main search properties, with both contributing to 99% of their individual total volumes.

AOL and the Ask Network, on the other hand, had a much more even distribution. 58% of AOL searches coming from the search network while 42% came from MapQuest and other AOL properties. Less than half (49%) of the Ask Network’s searches came from Ask.com while 51% came from MyWebSearch and other properties.

A comparison with the same period a year ago shows that Google’s market share grew 6% points between January 2008 and January 2009, while that of Yahoo! fell 2% points and Microsoft fell 1% point.

Yahoo!, though, has actually gained market share for the fifth consecutive month now, at the expense of Microsoft and Ask.com mostly, but also at the expense of Google last month.

On Internet Explorer

When seen on an Internet Explorer (IE 7+) window, with no toolbars installed, ads now cover 49% of the screen area for Live Search results when seen on a monitor with 800 x 600 resolution, 44% of the results area at 1024 x 768 resolution and 37% of the results area at 1280 x 1024 resolution.

Ads seen on IE 8 with no active toolbars on an 800 x 600 monitor

On Firefox

With just one active toolbar installed, on Firefox the ads now cover 55% of the screen area for Live Search results when seen on a monitor with 800 x 600 resolution, 46% of the results area at 1024 x 768 resolution and 38% of the results area at 1280 x 1024 resolution.

Ads seen on Firefox with one active toolbar on an 800 x 600 monitor

According to Tina Kelleher of Microsoft, these changes have been made taking into consideration the feedback sent to Live Search by adCenter advertisers. This alteration will enable the generation of more clicks for pay per click campaigns being run on adCenter.

A recent report from analytics firm Covario found that global technology firms increased their ad spend on pay per click ads on Microsoft adCenter by 45.7% in the last quarter of 2008, compared to the same period in 2007.

The placement of a fourth mainline ad was introduced by adCenter last September in the U.S.A; and has shown very encouraging results in that market since then.

There is no mention of any consideration for how this change might be received by users and the impact it might have on the perceived quality of Live Search results.

According to the terms of the agreement, Live Search will now be the default search engine for most of the new consumer and small business PCs that Dell ships globally. Considering the fact that Dell is the largest provider of PCs in the U.S. and the second largest OEM worldwide, a lot of new clients will now have the chance to use Live for their searches, without any trouble. All these new PCs will also have a Live Search-powered toolbar.

This agreement between Dell and Microsoft will be applicable across 23 countries worldwide ranging from Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, U.K. U.S.A. and many others and will come into effect from February 2009.

HP and Lenovo PCs shipped within North America already include Live Search as the default search engine.

The other interesting announcement made by Steve Ballmer is to the effect that Microsoft beat Google to acquire a five-year deal with Verizon, the second largest mobile carrier in the U.S.A. Thanks to this deal, users of Verizon Mobile in the U.S. will be able to use Live Search Mobile as their default search service.

Google is probably unhappier about the deal with Verizon, as mobile continues to be one of their top priorities for future growth and losing out to Microsoft in this relatively nascent market does not bode well.

However, no matter how many deals Microsoft can muscle in with providers and OEMs, it is the consumers who will finally decide, and far as consumers are concerned, Google is undoubtedly firmly entrenched in their hearts and minds.

The Live homepage will now work as a social network page, enabling users to find out what their contacts are doing.

home.live.com

It will also be possible to see the latest headlines, local weather and calendar through the Live homepage. Recent photographs of the user will be displayed at the top of the page. Other services offered will include Events, Mail, People, Skydrive and MSN.

Microsoft has made the service truly social, with the ability for users to modify their profile, upload profile photos that rotate and create and join groups. The profile page contains details of the user’s activities, not only on Windows Live, but also on Flickr, Twitter, Yelp and other networks.

Users can network with friends from their Windows Live (MSN Messenger) contacts as well as Facebook and LinkedIn contacts. The latter two require logging in using a Facebook and a LinkedIn ID, but this is likely to change very soon as Facebook Connect readies for launch.

This, of course, is the second instance of Microsoft showing how they plan to leverage their investment in Facebook. The first was back in October, when Facebook announced that its users could search the Web via Live Search.

TechCrunch reports that Windows Live has initially been updated only in the U.S. and 54 other countries will also be able to avail of these services by the beginning of the next year. However, a number of UK users are already seeing the updates on their Live homepage.

Windows Live Search has integrated itself with over 50 companies, such as LinkedIn, Flickr and Pandora. HP will also integrate Windows Live Search into their new printers, and Windows Live Search will be cobranded by China Telecom. Could Microsoft be abandoning their direct fight with Google on the search front and instead gunning for dominance on the social front?

Facebook users in the U.S.A. will now be able to “Search Facebook” or “Search the Web”. Relevant ads from Microsoft adCenter will be shown along with the search results.

Henceforth when Facebook users type a query in the search bar, there will be a drop down menu alongside, giving them the choice to search the Web if they so desire. The results of this search will be provided on a new page of Facebook, and related ads will be found on the right hand side of the page.

Ad relevance will be based largely on the search query, but could also factor in the user profile and settings in the near future. This is the first actual collaboration between Facebook and Live Search. Future developments between the two will be made based on the response and feedback received from their clients.

Facebook has now become the largest social network worldwide and is also fast growing in popularity in the U.S. though MySpace still remains the number one social network there. This collaboration should give an additional impetus to Microsoft Live Search, which should now start receiving more queries, thus generating more revenue in the process.

Perhaps the most useful feature in this update is the ability to provide directions with respect to well known landmarks such as petrol pumps, fast food restaurants, convenience and grocery stores, hotels and so on. However, this will be made available only to users in Canada and the U.S.A. for now.

Users will now get a better bird’s eye view of various locations in several cities of North America. 3D images will also be available. Live Search will also provide information about the local weather conditions, and 3D pictures of cloud formations over given areas will be updated every 3 hours.

Locations with similar names and alternate spellings will be accessible through a ‘near-matching’ feature. Related neighborhoods will also be included in the search results.

Localised maps of all regions will be available on desktops as well as on mobile phones. Mobile Internet users will be provided with better imagery than before.

Users will now be able to decide whether they want to choose driving routes based on the shortest time taken, the shortest distance or direction of traffic flow; and all this will be made available with a single click.

Microsoft is definitely as good as Google, if not better, as far as the technology behind their maps is concerned. That, however, is not enough to make Live Search Maps the leading service. Microsoft needs to seriously rethink its overall user acquisition strategy or they will continue to lose market share in spite of having a better product.

Analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman report that compared to their earlier study that was conducted in July 2007, the current study shows that Google Maps has progressed considerably, while its competitors, Map Quest by AOL, and Yahoo! Maps have stagnated.

Live Search Maps from Microsoft has shown some improvement in the past year, but their map service still remains the least popular among the top 4 services. Friedland and Kopelman further stated that “Yahoo! and Map Quest do not have the resources to keep pace and are forced to aggressively monetise a declining franchise in the maps segment.”

Apart from having very good maps, Google also has additional features, such as Street View, driving directions, traffic monitoring and public transport directions. But what makes them the winner is simply their dominance as the leading provider of information on the Internet.
The most important rammification of Google’s dominance is the importance map-based data and location-specific information will have in the upcoming mobile Internet market. People on the move will often want to refer to these maps when they are in unknown surroundings. Google Maps will be able to attract advertisers in the near future and hence help companies generate even more revenues. An investment made to improve maps on the Internet today will pay off many times over in the near future.

The exact date for the launch of this new project is yet to be decided, but is expected to be by the end of this year.

Microsoft already has strong ties with Facebook, since the company bought a 5% stake in the social network last October, and has been providing contextual advertising on Facebook. The deal cost them $240 million at the time, but there had been no mention about whether search operations would be a part of the deal or not.

Facebook, which is believed to have over 100 million users worldwide, is expected to be of great help to Microsoft in gaining more exposure, and eventually improving their market share in the field of search.

Google and MySpace have a similar agreement in place, which guarantees MySpace an annual income of $900 million. However, the partnership has not done as well as expected, and Google has indicated that they are looking for ways to better monetise the deal.

While it is obvious, that people will continue to conduct their primary searches through the site of their preference – Google, it is expected that at least a few users will make use of the search functions on popular partner sites such as Facebook, which could boost Microsoft Live Search numbers over time.

All products having a ‘Buy it Now’ price on eBay, ranging from jewelry to electronics, will be eligible for a certain amount of refund, thus helping clients to save some money.

The purchases will have to be routed through Paypal, and the percentage of cash back, could be as high as 35%. The offer will be valid for up to 3 purchases, and a maximum of $250, will be paid as cash back.

There will however be some differences between this and other cash back schemes:

• All eBay ads will display a cashback icon
• Clients can go directly into the advertiser’s (eBay) website, instead of going through Live Search
• The cashback icon will be visible all the time that the client is shopping on eBay, which is a good reminder for the client, and Live Search would like to follow this method with other advertisers if possible.

Live Search will continue to make modifications in this system, based on the feedback they get from customers and advertisers.

There are 2 ways to implement these cash back schemes:

Destination site experience- here users, study a particular product category, and then go to a Live Search cashback ad, in order to get the best deal available.

Direct to merchant experience- here the advertisers ads will directly show the cashback icon (gleam). When the customers click on the icon they are directly taken to the advertisers site.

Both of the above schemes are still to be fine-tuned, in order to achieve the best results in the simplest manner and the Live Search team is eagerly looking for customer feedback to achieve this.

The amount of money being offered will vary from 2% to 30%, on different items being sold through various etail outlets. This move is an obvious attempt by Microsoft to convince its advertisers that Live Search can beat Google in the search engine advertising game.

Chairman Bill Gates believes that online search has just begun to get competitive, and has promised big announcements in the industry every six months.

Online shoppers who buy anything from Microsoft’s 700+ partners via the Live Search Cashback site will be eligible for a certain percentage refund on the purchase. The percentage cashback is clearly indicated alongside each of the 700+ million items. Cash back payments will be made through PayPal, by cheque or directly into the customer’s bank account.

http://search.live.com/cashback

Retail brands that have signed up for this programme include Barnes and Noble, Home Depot and Sears. The cashback percentage offered on the same item varies across different suppliers, as can be seen in the example below:

Google currently holds 60% share of the search market in the USA, while Microsoft is a distant third with only about 10% market share. Expectedly, this campaign has generated both positive and negative reviews from various quarters. Some believe that even a cashback policy will not improve Microsoft’s position, because the services of Google are far superior. Others believe that this is an interesting idea and may be able to lure away at least some of Google’s users who may be susceptible to bribes or rebates, especially during a recession.

Cash is the one thing Microsoft has plenty of. Perhaps using this cash to lure searchers away from Google might serve Live Search better than trying to buy other struggling companies like Yahoo! or even just the Yahoo! Search and marketing platform.
Microsoft is also enticing advertisers and retailers to its own platform by changing the working pattern commonly followed: Advertisers usually pay on a cost per click basis, but now Microsoft is offering a cost per acquisition model – that is, advertisers will pay only for actual sales made through Microsoft’s search services.

This is not the first time Microsoft have used monetary rewards to lure searchers. The first time reeked of desperation. But it must have worked, since they are at it again. Even if Microsoft does succeed in luring some users away from Google with this cash back rewards, will they be able to hold on to these customers after the scheme is withdrawn?

Live News Search originally served as a plain search service that focused on news stories. The Live News Search homepage contained no more than a search box and a short list of popular current news searches. However, since the growth in popularity of Google News as a news portal, Microsoft has decided to expand the capabilities of their News Search site.

News stories will now get categorised into ten sub-topics in the USA. These are: Top Stories, World, U.S., Local, Business, Politics, Entertainment, Sports, SciTech and Health. The updated version is not currently available to UK users.

Several new features have been added to the News search service to satisfy customer needs and to improve the overall user experience. Some of the highlights are:

1. Aggregated news
   Users can now browse through the latest headlines in a manner similar to that on Google News. Breaking news is placed prominently so that users are always informed of the latest developments. Stories will be grouped according to categories.
2. Localisation
   Local news will be presented across all states in the U.S.A. When the update is rolled out in Europe, the local news feature will provide information specific to individual countries.
3. Multimedia
   Various forms of multimedia including video and images will be accessible through smart-motion thumbnails, so that visitors can read the headlines and watch video footage at the same time.

In effect, the news search page will now contain local, national and international news along with multimedia all at once. For those interested in further details, they can either click ‘more on this story’ or query a topic in the search box. The news search results can also be filtered according to the user’s location and by source.

Suggestions on related topics will also be offered. Articles will be grouped by date. Related videos will be directly available. Further innovations such as the inclusion of blogs are in the planning stages. RSS support is also planned in the near future.

Coverage will also be improved drastically, as Live News will now be powered with information from over 2,000 sources as against only about a 100 in the past.

Live News Search

The annnouncement came just one day after Yahoo! announced its intention to support Google’s OpenSocial platform. Microsoft has never been truly open, and so joining any alliance like OpenSocial or even forming a truly similar initiative of its own is out of the question. Microsoft has however taken some big strides to improve data portability and allow users better control over the use of their information.

Several new APIs and tools that help third-parties develop more applications were announced during MIX08 last month. And now a new ‘Windows Live Contacts API‘ has been launched to allow users to transfer and share their contact lists, without any security concerns.

Social networks partnered with Microsoft through this initiative will gradually shift to using Windows Live Contacts API instead of using the method called ‘screen scraping’, which was not a very secure means and exposed users to spam and, worse still, identity fraud.

Users will be given ultimate control in deciding which of their contacts, if any, get shared with each of the participating social networks.

Read the full announcement from Microsoft

Microsoft has also created a new site where users from the partner social networks can download Live Messenger and invite their friends from the social networks to chat with them. This would normally seem a surprising move from Facebook, given that they are likely to launch their own chat client in the near future. However, Microsoft’s stake in the company has probably influenced the decision to support a competing product.

www.invite2messenger.net

This re-launched Go mobile platform from Yahoo! will open the doors to third-party application developers, just like Google’s Android project does. Yahoo! Go is relatively popular… quite a few users have actually downloaded the software onto their mobile phones. Other developers don’t need to convince users to do the same with their applications as well; they can just piggy-back on the Yahoo! platform now.

Download Yahoo! Go

Go 3.0 itself offers some impressive improvements, in the form of a more personalised homepage and an “upgraded user-interface”. The improvements make the entire user experience more conducive to browsing the Internet, or at least the Yahoo! Go-related Internet from a mobile phone. Some of the nicer features we liked were:

• Smooth browsing through Flickr photographs
• Easy integration with Yahoo! Mail
• Quick, free access to local information including traffic and weather

Yahoo! has also been busy developing what it likes to believe will be the next generation of web services, within a social setting. The CEO of the company, Jerry Yang personally attended CES 2008, where he demonstrated a new service that he called “Life with an exclamation point”, which aims to integrate different applications such as email, structured data, tags and other information in a social context and thus help users in multiple facets of their life through advanced technology.

This interface too will be open to third party application integration. Like Facebook, the new service’s homepage will also highlight relevant updates from various connections instead of just showing an inbox. Dan Farber at ZDNet has details and screenshots of the demo system.

As TechCrunch have noted, similar such platforms and strategies have been adopted in the past by the likes of Microsoft, Google and Facebook. It remains to be seen whether Yahoo! Life!, which sounds eerily similar to Microsoft Live, will really provide anything new or if it will turn out to be just another copy of the same old platforms.

Yahoo! hope the two new offerings will enable their customers to use the Web more productively and more easily. However it will take a while for the complete new social package to be available due to security concerns, which must be addressed first. They expect to see some form of the platform during the year, but full functionality might not be available in 2008.

One hopes that these latest innovations will help to restore Yahoo! to its earlier place of pride vis-à-vis the internet, considering the fact that they used to be the stars of the Internet before Google came and rained on their parade. Share prices of Yahoo! Inc. have taken a beating off late while those of their competitor, Google Inc; have risen significantly, often at Yahoo!’s expense.

Fast Search and Transfer has made minor headlines in the past year with its mobile search product and deals forged with Virgin Mobile and Infospace. The company offers a range of services including enterprise search, eCommerce solutions, information management, mobile and online media to about 3500 companies, some of which fall in the Fortune 500.

As per the public declaration, Microsoft has offered Fast Search and Transfer US $3.56 per share, which is a 42 percent premium on its share price of Jan 4 2008. The total value of the deal is estimated to be US $1.2 billion or £600 million. The board of directors at Fast Search obviously consider this an excellent offer as they have unanimously recommended that its shareholders should accept it. Over 35% of the shareholders have already agreed to accept the offer.

As in all business deals there are observers and analysts who approve of the deal and those who do not. There are many who feel that $1.2 billion is too much money for a company like Fast, and that Microsoft should have waited a while and acquired the company at a lower price, once the recession, which the U.S. economy seems to be heading towards, had struck. Others believe that this is a smart move by Microsoft, and will help them further consolidate their position in the long run.

In all likelihood, the deal will have little impact on the overall search market, but will provide Microsoft access to a more robust mobile search offering and a new distribution network.

Live Search Webmaster Center

One would expect that after taking so long to offer a resource for webmasters, the Live Search Webmaster Center would provide some snazzy tools and give a lot of good information that would justify its late arrival. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Live Search was officially released from closed beta on the 15th of November. This was accompanied by the creation of the Live Search Webmaster Center blog, where the Program Manager admitted, “We know we have a lot of work still to do and we would like to get your feedback on the tools as well as suggestions for future tools.”

Ironically, the first thing many webmasters noticed was that the feedback form did not work well. Frustratingly, what a large number of webmaster also noticed was that the tool was flawed.

Live Search Webmaster Tools currently has trouble accepting a number of websites. No official comment has been received about the reason behind this error or what is even causing it. A large number of webmasters who tried to add their sites were greeted with an error that says “Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.”

For sites that are successfully added, the statistics provided are mostly regular fare: last crawl date, top 5 pages, keyword ranking, robots.txt validation, top 10 inbound links and top 10 outbound links. The only unique thing about this tool is the 5-point ranking system it provides for the domain, the top pages and the top links. This system is similar in principle to Google’s PageRank.

Google now accounts for more than 85 per cent of all searches in the country. Their market share is still growing, and it continues to do so at the expense of all three of its competitors.

The chart below shows the latest UK Internet search data from Hitwise for the four week period ending 20 September 2007 compared to four weeks ending 26 May 2007:

Source: Hitwise UK

Ask, Microsoft and Yahoo! have clearly lost market share to Google, in spite of each of their individual efforts to win UK search clicks. Ask has invested in an ongoing television and billboard advertising campaign in the UK. Yahoo! has tried to generate a lot of publicity around their Panama platform, and Microsoft has rebranded and tried various half-hearted and wholly unsuccessful tactics.

Google’s lead has gone beyond the point where quality alone will win back users. Ask’s current search interface is far superior to Google’s Universal Search. It still has not won back any market share, partly due to poor quality of the main text results, but also because hardly anyone has even bothered to try using their improved interface.

Similarly, an improved advertiser experience alone will not win search traffic away from Google. Microsoft and Yahoo! should focus on winning search traffic before trying to woo advertisers.

The first and most important update comes in the form of Voice Input. Windows Mobile users can activate the service by pressing the lower left soft-key on their handset and saying what they want to search for. Microsoft uses advanced voice recognition technology, most likely acquired from TellMe, to understand what the user is looking for, and delivers results accordingly.

Other improvements to Live Search Mobile announced today include the ability to use local search to find gas (petrol) prices nearby, a new beta version of Live Search Mobile for Blackberry devices, improvements to the mapping function and delivery of details direct to the search results page for frequently searched topics such as weather, stock quotes and movie times.

Improvements to the Live Maps Mobile are very user-friendly. Microsoft has probably been doing a lot of user search research or listening to feedback from their loyal users. The updated map function is easier to read on mobile devices, provides driving directions that include consideration for severe traffic congestion and provide the names of the final cross streets to prevent users driving too far.

An official post on the Live Search Blog claims that Microsoft listened to feedback on the blog, analysed their search data and spoke to thousands of users in order to deliver a cutting edge search product. Their efforts were focused on reducing page load times, streamlining the look and feel, providing more high-interest content in the video, local, entertainment, shopping, and health verticals and relevance – improving the ranking algorithm, stop-word handling and auto-spell correction.

“With this update to Live Search, our engineering focus is on the areas that matter most to our 185 million consumers who use our service every month,” said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft. “With the core platform in place we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time.”

Comparing the new Live Search with Ask.com’s brilliant new interface immediately brings to light how far behind Microsoft actually are:

Searching for the artist ‘Madonna’ on Live Search produces a page with a feature similar to the Google / Yahoo! OneBox. Searches for entertainers bring back a Celebrity xRank, up to 4 images and quick links to view videos, news and other snippets of relevant information. Clicking on the xRank links brings users to the following page:

Video search is a bit more impressive. Users can actually preview the results within the same window by simply moving the mouse over the image.

Generic product searches deliver a page with images of four products with average user ratings, the product names and price ranges below each item. Searches for specific products or brands result in a page with details such as user reviews at a glance, average user ratings, a product image, description and price range and a link to buy it on MSN Shopping.

Microsoft is open to feedback on the design of their new search results pages. Alongside each new feature a pair of links allows users to vote on whether they found it useful or not. The bottom of the page includes a link to provide feedback and search results that include semantic variations of the query include an option to search with only the exact query string.

Individual enhancements on the new Live Search might be very well thought out, but the experience does not yet give the effect of seamlessness that Google’s Universal Search or Ask.com currently give their users. Live Search still needs to master the ability to provide users a variety of relevant results within the page, rather than just the OneBox.