SES San Jose Coverage: MSN's approach on Multilingual Search Markets

[Nacho]

Today, after the "Excecutive Roundtable" session I was able to swing by a little crowd of guys with polo shirts that said "MSN Search" and started conversation with one of them (great guy and open). So, the topic came about, "How is MSN Search approaching the Multilingual Search Markets?" and gave him my usual example of the Hispanic market of course

His response was outstanding in my opinion because if focuses on the entire idea of personalization. He described how they are capitalizing at the time when the user either buys their new PC or installs the Microsoft software for the first time by asking a few language preferences (which could also be manually changed after if desired by the user). Therefore whether you are in the U.S. or in any other part of the world and you select your country and prefered language, that is also going to be your default search preference when users open up their Internet Explorer for the first time and defaults the MSN.com site. On the back end, when the user searches for the first time, MSN Search, will do it's best effort to bring a more relevant result based on your country and language chosen.

I thought that's great because it ties in to what we have discussed in the past about taking new direction to their algorithms for the Multilingual Search Markets to show better results. That of course opens up total different discussion about cost and challanges, but in reality that is something that I feel is the way it will be approached in the future of search.

Of course, users can change their default homepage to something else rather than MSN.com, but if MSN is providing great value in content at first Internet experience and high quality search (hopefully sometime soon ), then why change your default homepage?

You know, I think these guys at MSN Search may be comming late, but I think that they really want to do this right and win our loyalty. What do you guys think?

[Andy AtkinsKruger]

Nacho - thank you for sharing that. I sat behind the MSN t-shirts and didn't pick that up. Only thing is Yahoo and Google are even further ahead on the multilingual markets we work in which mainly means mainland Europe.

Just look at the number of language interfaces created by volunteers for Google for instance. Yahoo has cleaned up in Japan for years and Google has just bought the most popular Chinese engine.

MSN maybe have worldwide business - but in search they're not even at the starting blocks yet - never mind in the race.