Microsoft

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.

Yahoo and Microsoft have finalized their agreement to install Microsoft as the exclusive search provider for Yahoo's network of sites, the companies announced Friday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first approved a search deal in July, but the matter took a little extra time to complete.

(Credit: Yahoo/Microsoft)

The deal, first reached in July, still needs to be approved by the U.S. government before it becomes final. But the companies said in October that they needed more time to complete the deal due to the "complex nature of this transaction," and Friday's announcement is likely the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking review from expensive lawyers.

At least company executives didn't have to rack up the frequent-flier miles to finalize this year; they signed it virtually, with Microsoft's Qi Lu and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz representing their respective companies on the licensing agreement and Ballmer and Bartz inking the definitive agreement, according to sources familiar with the deal.

Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will provide search technology to Yahoo for up to 10 years, also gaining access to Yahoo's search technology assets and several hundred employees. It will then pay Yahoo a significant portion of the ad revenue generated alongside those searches.

A Yahoo representative declined to comment on the specifics of what held up the final approval of the deal. Both parties said they still expect the deal to become final in early 2010, although the government is sure to take a long hard look.

Ina Fried contributed to this report.

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.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it is selling off its Folio and NXT businesses to Massachusetts-based Rocket Software.

Folio, which now goes by the name of Rocket Folio, is a suite of four publishing tools, while NXT (now Rocket NXT) handles publishing Intranet documents. The two businesses came as part of Microsoft's acquisition of Fast Search and Transfer in 2008, a deal that was valued at $1.2 billion. Terms of Wednesday's deal have not yet been disclosed.

As part of the acquisition, Rocket Software will be taking over customer service duties, along with billing. An FAQ page about the change in hands has also been made available both on Microsoft's and Rocket Software's pages. Additionally, Rocket Software will be hosting a Webinar/town hall next week to talk about the transition.

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."

Representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo have filed paperwork for regulatory clearance in the U.S. for their proposed search deal but it remains unclear how to proceed in Europe, a Microsoft spokesman said on Wednesday.

The issue that remains in Europe is "determining whether or not the deal requires formal notice before the (European) Commission and if not, do we need to file notice" in individual countries that might have an interest in reviewing the deal, said Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans.

These jurisdictional issues are being discussed in ongoing talks Microsoft and Yahoo have been having with EC officials that were the subject of a Reuters report, according to Evans.

"We have had informal discussions in Europe about the agreement just as we indicated we would when the deal was announced," he said.

Yahoo representatives familiar with the matter did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Last week, the companies said the U.S. Department of Justice had asked for more information about their deal under which Microsoft would provide search for Yahoo's Web pages, thus bringing to a close Yahoo's tenure as a search provider.

The antitrust scrutiny is likely to be more intense in the U.S., where Google has about three quarters of the search market and Microsoft and Yahoo combined have about one fifth, than in Europe where Google's market share exceeds 90 percent.

Update 3:25 p.m. PDT: In a statement, a Yahoo spokesperson said "As we indicated at the time of announcement, the agreement is subject to regulatory approval and Yahoo and Microsoft are engaging in discussions with the regulators in Europe about the agreement. Yahoo and Microsoft are committed to engaging positively with the Commission about the agreement and firmly believe that the information we will be providing will confirm that this deal is not only good for both companies, but it is also good for advertisers, good for publishers, and good for consumers. As we have indicated previously, we're hopeful the agreement will close in early 2010."

Microsoft's new Bing search service is the fastest-growing U.S. search engine among the top 10, according to a Nielsen report released Monday.

The total amount of searches on Bing rang in at 1.1 billion for the month of August, a leap of 22.1 percent over July, winning Microsoft a 10.7 percent share of the search engine market.

Google remained in the top spot with a commanding 64.6 percent share, accounting for 7 billion searches in August, a gain of 2.6 percent over July. Yahoo saw its search results drop 4.2 percent for the month to 1.7 billion, earning it 16 percent of the market.

(Credit: Nielsen)

Other players in the top 10 included AOL Search in fourth place with 333 million searches and Ask.com Search in fifth with 186 million searches.

Similar studies have also seen a boost in Microsoft's search business. An August report from ComScore discovered that Microsoft's share of the global search engine market lept 41 percent from July 2008 to July 2009. Bing was introduced in May, taking the place of Microsoft's Live Search.

Earlier this week, Microsoft showed off a "visual search" feature for Bing that returns thumbnail images for at least some search results. Microsoft reportedly will be debuting a Bing 2.0 sometime soon sporting a variety of new features.

Microsoft has responded swiftly to suggestions that its Bing search engine seems to throw up ads alongside the keyword "pornography".

In a post Thursday, I outlined some of the suspicions that surrounded the appearance of ads for Bing next to searches for fleshy entertainment.

A Microsoft representative declared in an e-mail: "Microsoft has not purchased the keyword 'pornography,' and this term has never been in our AdWords account."

This will serve as a considerable relief to many upstanding citizens.

I searched 'pornography' on Flickr and this picture is what I got.

(Credit: CC Kessiye/Flickr)

The company representative continued: "It is our policy on the Bing marketing team that we do not have any adult content as part of any of our keyword buys or other marketing campaigns."

However, Microsoft has vivid views about how this alleged relationship between "binging" and films featuring somewhat less talented actors naked might have come about.

"The keyword that seems to be triggering these results is 'free videos,'" the Microsoft representative explained. "We are following up with Google to understand why this ad is showing up in these types of queries."

That should be a very interesting conversation. One looks forward to reading a transcript.