San Jose, Aug 22: Microsoft Corp. is "investing heavily" in Web search as an important and potentially lucrative market, Christopher Payne, the executive in charge of search, said. "On the information side of the house, there's no question that search is the cornerstone of our strategy. We're investing heavily in this space," Payne, a vice president for Microsoft's MSN Internet unit, said at Jupitermedia Corp.'s Search Engine Strategies Conference running this week in San Jose, California.
He declined to say how much money or how many people Microsoft was investing in the project, however.
Microsoft, the No. 1 software maker, earlier this year released its Web crawler, which collects the building blocks of information upon which Web search engines are built.
In a sign that Microsoft is preparing to put more of its programming muscle behind search services, the software giant recently said it will build its own algorithmic search engine to compete with companies like Google and Inktomi.
Bureau Report