Microsoft To Revamp MSN To Strengthen Bing ties

Microsoft isn’t too busy with Bing to put its decade-old portal site MSN out of focus. The software giant is working on a revamp for MSN. Microsoft would be looking to attract more users to the search engine. The company has been trying out a range of search box design to ind out which one attracts most queries. At present, the MSN portal accounts for half of Microsoft’s search engine crowd. In fact, the trend shows that there are comparatively less people who enter queries directly into Microsoft’s Live.com address that is now Bing.com.

Microsoft vice president Erik Jorgensen says,

A big part of my job is figuring out how I pull the Bing experience into MSN in a way that makes sense.

According to Jorgensen, one of the ways to bank on MSN is by posting features on the site that tie in to the company’s search engine. Microsoft has already discussed about ways it can write features that push people to their local, shopping and travel search engines. Each of these are a most lucrative sections of Microsoft’s search business and the areas in which Microsoft focuses.

To make its search engines more feasible, Microsoft need to ensure that there is minimal visual jerk when one moves between MSN and Bing.

In the initial week of its launch Bing has managed to gain some market share, but it would be vital to see if it sustains these gains in the coming months.

Apart from its massive ad campaign, Microsoft has also struck deals with PC makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell to involve more people to try Bing.

The company said that it wants to generate at least a couple points of market share in the first year. Certainly, this might not be enough to compete economically with Google. Well, in that case Microsoft only option might be to look towards talks with Yahoo, second in the search market with 20 percent of the search share.