Google & Beyond ....continued

Competitor 4: Microsoft
HOw it works?
Piece 1: This software in the works promises to allow you to enter your questions in English and get direct answers back. Search users neednt have to worry about selecting the right key words and linking them together with the right boolean operator and scrolling page after page of search results. Natural Language processing is the BUZZ

Piece 2: Stuff i have seen - Right now when we want to search for something we stop what we are doing open a seperate application and start the search and then try to integrate the result into whatever we are doing ...in this piece microsoft wants to make search a part of the ongoing computing experience. It is an always available search box inside the windows task bar, Enter a query into the box and Stuff i ve seen will display an organised list of links to related email , messages, calender appointments, office documents , web pages etc in a single unified window.

Some of this capability is expected to come out withe longshot...oops longhorn.

Watch this space for more cool stuff on SEARCH.