14 DAY TRIAL // The statements made in Australia by Steve Ballmer regarding the search engines and their evolution in general, and Microsoft's solutions in particular, are all focused on the comparison with Google.
Ballmer's comments, although subjective, contain some truths. The dynamic evolution of content, the overwhelming variety of information that has to be indexed and the integration of the searches on the PC or on the Intranet with the ones from the Internet are only a few challenges that have to be faced by the search engines.
In the same time, the search engine algorithms have become an attractive solution for companies, not only for home users. The possibility to search through hundreds of systems which form the network of a company for a piece of information is actually the future of searching.
Therefore, Ballmer is perfectly right when he says that searching won't be the same 10 years form now. The fact that Longhorn will include searching features that are much more complex than the ones offered by Windows XP is a sign that Microsoft will focus intensively on this domain.
The idea that the search engines algorithms proposed by Microsoft will be as good as the ones offered by Google is also very plausible considering that the giant from Redmond has enough resources to offer something competitive.
After all, Microsoft versus Google is only a battle fought for us, the users.