Bill Gates on search

Michael Kanellos at CNet interviews Bill Gates. Some interesting excerpts on search:

The commitment we made is to build unique search technology across the board. And if you look at the Microsoft Research things that we've had breakthroughs in -- natural language, document analysis, personalization, image analysis, language translation -- our research agenda will allow us to take today's search from ourselves and Google, and make what we have today look like a joke.

Just take the idea of finding your local pizza place and doing that right; search doesn't do that well today. Search is really crummy today -- it's just that it used to be really crummy, and now it's better, and there never was anything like this before. So most of the results people get back today are irrelevant results. Deep analysis can take us much further, and that's why we're investing a lot, and you'll see us more very rapidly.

There is a lot of great work going on at Microsoft Research. The trick at Microsoft has always been to get this work into their products. At Google, the research teams are so integrated into the product teams that you can't tell them apart.

See also my earlier post, "The secret weapon: An army of PhDs".

[CNet interview via Search Engine Watch Blog]