The EntityCube listing for Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid.
(Credit: CNET)Think of Microsoft's latest labs effort as the software maker's attempt to give everyone their own Wikipedia entry.
Dubbed EntityCube and now live to try out, the research project pulls together biographical information on anyone found on the Web.
Similar in some ways to other people-search projects that have been around for some time, EntityCube tries to cull the Web to build a dossier on whomever you can think of. Among the interesting features is the social graph that EntityCube builds, as well as its effort to automatically sort out information about different people with the same name. Particularly of note is the "Quanxi map" it can generate, although this feature seems to run particularly slow.
Although Web users can find information on just about anyone using search engines, they typically have to do so manually by going to many different sites. The goal of EntityCube, Microsoft researchers say, is to pull together all of that information.
"Even if a search engine could find all the relevant Web pages about an entity, the user would need to sift through all the pages to get a complete view of the entity," Microsoft said on a page describing the project. "EntityCube is an entity search and summarization system that efficiently generates summaries of Web entities from billions of crawled Web pages."
Although Microsoft's site makes reference to enitites, not people, the public EntityCube site at this point seems focused mainly on people. The EntityCube site went public late last week.
The project is coming out of Microsoft's research arm, but it would seem to be highly relevant to where the company's Bing efforts are headed. Last week, Microsoft announced an effort called "entity cards," in which Bing tries to put automatically generated summary information at the top of certain search queries, including notable people.
Something like EntityCube could conceivably allow Microsoft to expand that beyond the types of well-known people, such as musicians, for whom it currently offers summaries.
Even in cases where people do have a Wikipedia listing, they may only have a small entry, known as a stub. Such is actually the case with Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid, whose considerably more detailed EntityCube page is show above.
Microsoft gave an early look at EntityCube at this year's TechFest internal science fair back in February.
Microsoft says a change that was being tested was inadvertently moved onto the live Bing.com site, causing a half-hour outage on Thursday.
(Credit: CNET)Microsoft said that a configuration change that was mistakenly moved from testing onto the live Bing.com site was to blame for an outage Thursday that left Microsoft's search engine completely inaccessible for more than half an hour.
A Microsoft representative told CNET on Friday that the problem appears to have come when something being tested was moved onto the live site.
"A configuration change was mistakenly propagated to production from staging," the representative said. "It was supposed to stay in the test environment--it was a mistake."
In a blog posting that went up late on Thursday night, Microsoft Senior Vice President Satya Nadella said that a change made during testing had "unfortunate and unintended consequences."
"As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior," Nadella said. "Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com."
And here I thought Microsoft was just trying to be energy efficient by running Bing only 23 hours a day.
Nadella said that Microsoft is exploring what went wrong to make sure it doesn't happen again. The outage came just a day after Microsoft announced a variety of changes to Bing, including added detail for some results and improved mapping tricks.
On the plus side, though, as ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan pointed out, at least people noticed there was an outage. It's all about mindshare, right?In what could be a blow to its image, Microsoft's main Bing search site suffered through an outage on Thursday evening.
Visitors to Bing.com were getting a browser error message rather than a search bar. Service was down for at least 45 minutes before being restored around 7:10 p.m. PST.
Microsoft acknowledged the issues on its Twitter feed and said it was looking into the matter. It later offered the following explanation, posted to a Bing blog by Satya Nadella, senior vice president of the Online Services division:
The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com.
We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing. We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again.
A Microsoft representative did not immediately return an e-mail seeking comment.
The outage comes after a big week in which Microsoft announced new search abilities for Bing as well as improved mapping.
Updated at 7:13 p.m. PST to reflect site's return. Updated at 11:13 p.m. PST with Microsoft statement.
Although Microsoft and Yahoo have only just inked their final search deal and still need regulatory approval, Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi talked on Tuesday about the economics that the deal will bring.
Speaking at a Credit Suisse technology investor conference in Arizona, Mehdi said that both Microsoft and Yahoo should see a double-digit increase in revenue per search, once the two companies have a single paid search system.
Mehdi
(Credit: Microsoft)Putting their two separate paid search systems together will take longer than just setting up Yahoo to use Bing's algorithmic search.
"That is going to take some time," Mehdi said in the speech, which was Webcast on Microsoft's investor site. Just closing the deal has taken quite awhile. There was the months of talks of an outright acquisition, then the eventual search deal announced in July, and then several more months spent ironing out the final details.
Now Microsoft is waiting on regulatory approval on the deal, but Mehdi said he remains optimistic that it will get the nods it needs in time to close the deal early next calendar year.
The integration is also going to be expensive Mehdi acknowledged, reiterating a past estimate that Microsoft will spend $100 million to $200 million in transition costs during the first year. Mehdi said the company has not said how much it expects to spend in the second year, but said that after that, the deal should be a boon to Microsoft's financial results.
As for Bing, Mehdi said executives are pleased with the results for its first six months, citing ComScore U.S. search query market share figures that show Microsoft growing from 8.4 percent to 9.9 percent over that period. That said, Mehdi acknowledged that "we have a very long ways to go against a tough competitor."
Several Microsoft executives will be in San Francisco on Wednesday to talk about some new moves in search, including some developments in mobile and mapping. Google, meanwhile, is planning a search event of its own on Monday.
Why would anything between Microsoft and Yahoo go quickly?
After months of awkward teenage romance, the two companies finally announced that they had reached a deal in July.
Microsoft and Yahoo reached a "binding letter agreement" on their search deal in July, but ironing out the full pact is taking the two sides longer than anticipated, they said Wednesday.
(Credit: Microsoft/Yahoo)However, the two sides are apparently still working out the terms of what they agreed to in the "binding letter agreement" reached in July. In a regulatory filing on Wednesday, Yahoo said it and Microsoft need more time to iron out a definitive accord.
"The Letter Agreement specified that the parties would execute definitive agreements by October 27, 2009, but given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalized," Yahoo said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
They have time, as regulators are still pouring over the deal.
In a statement, Microsoft said the two companies remain committed to their arrangement.
"Given the complex nature of this transaction, there remain some issues that need some additional clarity and definitive details," a Microsoft representative said in a statement. "So the teams at Yahoo and Microsoft are continuing to work on the remaining details, and we have mutually agreed to extend the period to negotiate and execute the agreement."
Microsoft said "both companies are optimistic that we will be able to close this deal by early 2010."
Microsoft's search deal with Yahoo is the culmination of months of well documented negotiations, but in many ways, it is just the beginning of the long road ahead.
In the coming months, Microsoft and Yahoo will not only have to win regulatory approval for the deal, but also figure out how to bring together disparate approaches to the search market.
Microsoft has spent much of its energy in the last couple years refining its core technology, improving in vertical categories, and rebranding its Web search under the Bing moniker. Yahoo, meanwhile has put a lot of energy into tools that allow others to build on its technology, including the BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey efforts.
Mehdi
As part of the deal announced on Wednesday, Microsoft will now be responsible for trying to merge those efforts. In an interview, Microsoft Senior Vice president Yusuf Mehdi said Microsoft hasn't looked at the specific lines of code in that area, but is open to trying to take Yahoo's best ideas and integrate them into Bing.
"We like the approach that Yahoo has done," he said, referring to SearchMonkey and BOSS.
Both Mehdi and Yahoo Executive VP Schneider acknowledged that there are integration challenges, but Schneider said there is a clear delineation of who is responsible for what.
"At the same time we are integrating, we are really divide-and-conquering," Schneider said in the joint interview with Mehdi. "The reality is in the way we structured (the deal), it allows each of us to innovate in the areas that will jointly bring advantage."
The fact that the companies have already spent time thinking about these issues reflects the different nature of the discussions this time around.
Whereas last year's negotiations were done with Yahoo's board and a keen eye on Wall Street, the deal announced on Wednesday is much more focused on how to build a search business for the long term.
CEO Steve Ballmer noted on the conference call earlier Wednesday that the two sides have a 100-page playbook as opposed to a two-page term sheet and also noted that the negotiations were handled by management as opposed to representatives of the company's boards.
Schneider
In addition to being run by the top management from Microsoft's online group, including Mehdi, Senior Vice President Satya Nadella, and online unit President Qi Lu (a former Yahoo executive), Mehdi and Schneider said the negotiating teams routinely called on the companies' engineering and sales ranks to make sure the deal they were structuring made operational sense.
It wasn't just the typical few business development executives in a room hashing out financial details, the pair said. "We really have got a great vibe with Yahoo's operating team," Mehdi said.
The two companies will be able to do some work on their joint plans while the deal is pending, but there are limits as to how much collaboration can take place.
"We will do all of the pre-work that we are allowed to do in terms of preparing," Mehdi said. "We feel like we can make a lot of progress."
Ultimately, though, the two companies said they expect just integrating Bing's results into Yahoo in the U.S. will take several months, while moving from Yahoo's Panama ad-serving technology to Microsoft's AdCenter could take a year. It could be two years from the deal close before the two companies can fully implement the deal across the globe.
Microsoft's Mehdi didn't close the door on an eventual expansion of the deal into some of the areas the two companies had at one point considered, such as joint work on display advertising.
"Today is a start on a fantastic partnership which we are very excited about," Mehdi said. "By starting this partnership it allows us to over time build greater and deeper relationships. Right now the focus is on getting to a credible No. 2 player in search and paid search."
One of the open questions is what will happen to each company's business and workforce during the time that the deal is pending. Schneider said the companies have a communications plan for employees as well as the sorts of retention bonuses planned to keep key employees in place.
"We believe this is a winning plan," she said. "People want to be part of a winning vision."
Ultimately, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said some of Yahoo search employees will move to other parts of the company, some will be offered jobs at Microsoft, while others will eventually lose their jobs.
For his part, Mehdi said the company will continue to beef up its search staff while the deal is pending. "We are continuing to hire and invest in search."
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer uses a giant pen to sign the 10-year deal, alongside Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, on Wednesday at Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.
(Credit: Yahoo/Microsoft )After months of fits and starts, Microsoft and Yahoo on Wednesday announced a 10-year search deal that will see the two companies join forces to take on Google.
"In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo search while Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers," the companies said in a joint statement. The deal is expected to go into effect in 2010 and improve Yahoo's profitability, though not its revenue, the companies said.
Less expansive than the all-out, $44 billion acquisition Microsoft proposed last year--and even than some of the search partnerships once discussed--the deal does allow the companies to share resources and combine their engineering efforts. Even together, however, the two companies have only about 30 percent of the search market compared to Google, which has more than twice that amount.
"This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement. "Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we've created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness."
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, meanwhile, said that the move will help Yahoo focus on other areas, also adding that the deal has the full support of the company's board (lest anyone wonder what Carl Icahn thinks about the more limited deal).
"This is a significant opportunity for us," Bartz said. "Microsoft is an industry innovator in search and it is a great opportunity for us to focus our investments in other areas critical to our future."
Editors' note: The two companies had a conference call Wednesday morning to discuss the deal. Click here for our live-blog coverage of that event.
The dollar value
As for the financial terms, there is not the large upfront payment once discussed. However, Microsoft will offer both revenue guarantees to Yahoo as well as the lion's share of the search-advertising revenue generated on Yahoo's site.
That apparently wasn't enough to satisfy investors. In trading before the market opened, Yahoo's stock dropped more than 7 percent, or $1.28, to $15.94. Microsoft rose 1 percent, or 24 cents, to $23.71.
Yahoo will get 88 percent of search revenue created by its sites during the first five years, while Microsoft will guarantee a certain level of search revenue for 18 months in each country. The companies expect it will take about two years after the deal is approved to fully get the partnership up and running.
Once fully in place, Yahoo said it expects the deal will boost its annual operating income by about $500 million, while reducing capital expenditure by $200 million and increasing operating cash flow by about $275 million per year.
Microsoft will be able to incorporate Yahoo's search technology, including its Panama ad-selling tool, but the companies will use Microsoft's AdCenter sales tool and Bing search engine to power both sites.
Aiming to head off privacy concerns, the two companies noted that "the agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies."
The deal must still pass regulatory muster and the two companies anticipate it will take several months to finalize. "Microsoft and Yahoo expect the agreement to be closely reviewed by the industry and government regulators, and welcome questions," the companies said. "The companies are hopeful that closing can occur in early 2010."
Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces in search, but in a line clearly aimed at regulators, the companies take pains to note that their collaboration is limited to that arena.
"The agreement does not cover each company's Web properties and products, e-mail, instant messaging, display advertising, or any other aspect of the companies' businesses," they said. "In those areas, the companies will continue to compete vigorously."
Microsoft and Yahoo may well reach some sort of search partnership, but any deal is unlikely to come this week, a source told CNET News.
The on-again, off-again talks reportedly heated up last week, with Microsoft executives said to have traveled to Yahoo. The All Things Digital Web site reported that things were "down to the short strokes."
Among those said to have made the Silicon Valley trip were three of Microsoft's top online executives: Yusuf Mehdi, Satya Nadella, and Qi Lu.
However, a deal has yet to materialize, and a source said on Thursday that none is likely this week.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Yahoo's board plans to meet on Thursday for an "update" on the talks.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in May that she was open to a search deal if she believed in the partner's technology and they provided "boatloads" of money.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has indicated for more than a year now that he would like to strike some sort of search deal, although he no longer wants to acquire all of Yahoo as his company offered to do in February 2008.
Yahoo declined to comment on board meetings or matters. A Microsoft representative declined to comment
There's a funny video making the rounds that mocks Microsoft's huge Bing ad campaign.
In the video, embedded below, CollegeHumor.com suggests that folks start "googling with Bing."
It's a funny parody of the Bing ads, but it also shows how big Microsoft's challenge is in search.
Bing, it says, lets you Google photos, Google maps, and more. After months of development and testing, Microsoft's revamped search engine made its public debut about one month ago.
On the one hand, typing in Bing.com is just as easy as typing in Google.com (it's actually two characters shorter). In that sense, the bar for changing search engines is low.
At the same time, Google has become synonymous with search. I have been making a concerted effort to try Bing for some of my searches and even made it the default in my search bar in Firefox. I still find myself performing more than half my searches in Google--just because I type Google.com by habit.
On the plus side, Bing has made modest gains in its first couple of weeks. But the real question is whether people will keep googling with Bing. (and of course, maybe some day just Bing with Bing.)
Microsoft has grabbed another Yahoo executive.
Operations Vice President Kevin Timmons becomes the latest to swap Yahoo purple for Microsoft blue. In his new role, Timmons will lead a data center services team, Microsoft infrastructure services general manager Arne Josefsberg said in a blog posting.
In February, Microsoft announced it was hiring Larry Heck, another VP from Yahoo. Other defectors include Microsoft online unit chief Qi Lu, along with Sean Suchter and Scott Moore (who was actually a former Microsoft worker who went to Yahoo and is now back at Microsoft).
Microsoft has said it no longer wants to acquire all of Yahoo, though clearly the company is happy to continue hiring talent from the online company. CEO Steve Ballmer has also continued to press for some sort of search partnership between the two companies.
At last month's D: All Things Digital conference, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz confirmed the two companies continue to talk, but analysts say a deal is looking less likely.
