Microsoft search boss: 'Silk Road' will lead to greater market share
Microsoft is adding a fourth pillar to its search-business strategy that involves opening up its search interfaces and infrastructure to third-party developers to get them to incorporate Microsoft's search engine in their sites and services.
That set of initiatives, code-named "Silkroad," is one of Microsoft's key search initiatives for the coming year, said Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President of Search, Portal & Advertising.
In a November 13 post to the Live Search blog, Angus Norton, Director of Live Search, explained Silk Road this way:
"Today at PubCon we launched a new release of the Live Search API for publishers and web developers. Now, in one place, we're making available what is essentially a content management system for your site or blog, plus the ability to monetize by selling ads.
"This release is the next step in what we're calling Project Silk Road, a broad range of tools and services we're offering online publishers and developers to help them generate traffic, increase engagement on their sites, drive insight, and boost productivity and agility."
(More information on the Live Search application programming interface (API) 2 piece of Silk Road can be found on the Dev.Live.com site.)
(The other three Microsoft search pillars are improvements to the core search experience via better relevance, new algorithms, etc.; continued emphasis on search verticals like product search, travel and healthcare; and ongoing work to introduce more new search business models via programs like Live Search Cashback, Live SearchPerks, etc.)
Nadella noted that Microsoft is continuing to deliver a new Live Search update twice yearly, as he committed to do a year ago. In between the two major annual updates, the company continues to roll out incremental new search features. Three weeks ago, for example, Microsoft updated its Virtual Earth and local search verticals. It also recently added a new opinion index capability to local search and integrated its FareCast travel search into its core search experience.
Microsoft "fall update" to Live Search will roll out this week and next, Nadella said. Today, for example, Microsoft tweaked its video search capability to improve Live Search's ability to search for long-form video content, he said.
Powerset, the natural-language search engine Microsoft acquired earlier this year, is being integrated gradually into Live Search, Nadella said. Right now, Powerset is crawling Wikipedia. Over the coming months, Microsoft will add other unspecified data sources across which Powerset will work, he said.
Nadella had nothing new to say about Microsoft and Yahoo and said CEO Steve Ballmer was the one doing all the talking about what was/wasn't happening in that space. He also declined to offer any new information on rumors that Microsoft is close to cementing a deal with Verizon to include Live Search as a default on Verizon phones. When I asked him for a response to criticism by some that Microsoft was spending too much money to "buy" search traffic, Nadella bristled a bit.
"Some have been calling on us to get more aggressive here," Nadella said.
He noted that Microsoft has models showing that the company can monetize its search by acquiring users to better compete.
Nadella said Microsoft's strategy in mobile search isn't to simply "serve up" the search capabilities it offers PC users, but to reinvent vertical search, CashBack and all of its other programs to be optimized for mobile devices.
Microsoft launched on November 12 an update to its Mobile Search platform's browse service. The update is optimized to work better on iPhones, and includes the ability to do localized product searches and XRank celebrity searches from a mobile phone browser.
Nadella also made it clear Microsoft hasn't given up on trying to change the metrics by which it (and, company officials hope, its customers, partners and company watchers) measure its search success.
In "end user share, we have lost (some points) over the last year in general Web (search)," Nadella admitted. "But we hae 13 percent of the total commerce searches and referrals, which is close to two times our organic search share."
(Update: As Todd Bishop notes over on TechFlash, this 12-13 percent figure comes from a custom ComScore study commissioned by Microsoft, and doesn't include comparative Google or Yahoo data.)
Nadella said there's no such thing as a 'Plan B' for Microsoft if it doesn't end up buying Yahoo.
"My Plan B is my Plan A," he said -- meaning the aforementioned core search, vertical, business model and platform APIs -- are Microsoft's search touch points.
What's your take? Can Nadella & Co. succeed with this search gameplan?