July 27, 2004

Microsoft on Tuesday is to begin testing a new online news aggregation service, as part of its increasing search competition with Google.

In conjunction with its own MSNBC news site, the software giant is creating a page dubbed "Newsbot" that will draw news headlines from more than 4,800 other sites, in a manner similar to the Google News service.

The page will let visitors create their own customized news feeds that are powered by MSN's new search technology, the company said. (Google News offers something similar, but it calls them customized alerts.)

"By providing a variety of ways to personalize the service, people have more control over how and where they get their news," Yusef Mehdi, corporate vice president of MSN Information Services and Merchant Platform, said in a statement. "We're confident (this) will convince people to return every day, much like a neighborhood newsstand."

Although news aggregation services have been a feature of portal sites such as Yahoo since the mid-1990s, the rise of automatic headline services that are based on Web search technology has added new importance to an old idea.

Google's news service has drawn millions of people eager for up-to-the-minute headlines, while worrying some news executives who fear that readers will visit aggregation sites instead of the original publications' home pages.

Microsoft has been increasingly vocal about its goal of recapturing some of Google's momentum in search and related technologies. It launched a new version of its MSN search tool last month, and is working internally on more advanced search tools capable of scouring PCs and e-mail folders as well as Web sites.

The initial version of the Newsbot site will be a test that's aimed at gauging surfers' reactions, the company said. A final version will be relaunched after the test period.

Microsoft has been testing a similar aggregation service in Europe since late 2003.

Source: C-Net News

        

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.