John Battelle is one of the authorities on search and
his Searchblog is a must read for anyone interesting in the Search space.
Recently he conducted an interview with Garry Flake who used
to work for Overture and then moved on to work for Yahoo. Garry is now working for Microsoft as the director for the
Live Labs strategy. His job being to get Microsoft and Microsoft Research to come up with the next generation in
search. Garry provides some very honest answers to some well thought out questions.Insightful interview with Garry Flake of Microsoft Search
John Battelle is one of the authorities on search and
his Searchblog is a must read for anyone interesting in the Search space.
Recently he conducted an interview with Garry Flake who used
to work for Overture and then moved on to work for Yahoo. Garry is now working for Microsoft as the director for the
Live Labs strategy. His job being to get Microsoft and Microsoft Research to come up with the next generation in
search. Garry provides some very honest answers to some well thought out questions.Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. MS is going its own way, so I wouldn't expect that they will try matching Google relevance. PR is not the only way to calculate rankings. MS has already implemented neural networks into their search and this is just a beginning. I think we'll see another revolutionary algos from MSN soon.
3. MSN is not close to Google's relevance, for now. The fact that Mr. Flake claimed MSN has superior hardware to Google/Yahoo is questionable, at best. Google's hardware is top secret, I doubt they know what they currently run or are migrating towards.
Overall, the interview was just another dodgy, non-specific explanation of how MSN plans to beat Google (like the one offered by Microsoft's European President recently).
I'd prefer less hype, more action from Microsoft's search department. They seem to be talking a great game, but that's it.
Posted at 11:39PM on May 4th 2006 by Adam Sharp








1. really interesting stuff. How soon do you think MS will be at Google's *current* relevance level? I don't understand why more effort has not gone into matching Google relevance as Yahoo has now done.
Posted at 5:22AM on Apr 14th 2006 by Trav