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MSN search engine
suffers hours-long outage
Microsoft Corp.'s
MSN search engine, the third most popular in the U.S.,
suffered an hours-long outage on Thursday as queries returned
an error message instead of Web page results. The outage began
around 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time and ended around noon, according
to a spokeswoman for Microsoft. The company is still trying to
determine what caused the problem. The search engine appeared
to be working properly at press time.
MSN's search
engine fields about 2.5 billion queries from users worldwide
every month, the spokeswoman said. It ranked third in the U.S.
in February, with 13.5% of all queries, behind leader Google
Inc. (42.3%) and Yahoo Inc. (27.6%), according to comScore
Networks Inc. It's not common for an outage of this length and
severity to affect a service of such high visibility from a
vendor with deep technical resources and expertise. It also
doesn't help Microsoft's years-long crusade to give Google a
run for its money in the search-engine
market.
Microsoft has invested heavily in recent years
to develop its own search-engine technology and accompanying
paid-search advertising network. In March, Microsoft begin
testing an enhanced version of its search engine, featuring a
new image-search service, a redesigned user interface and new
tools to refine query results. The enhanced search engine,
called Windows Live Search, is at www.live.com, and it wasn't
affected by Thursday's outage, the spokeswoman said. As part
of Windows Live Search's announcement last month, Justin
Osmer, an MSN senior product manager, told the IDG News
Service that Microsoft believes these are still early days in
the search-engine market and that victory can't be conceded to
Google. "We see this as a long-term problem to solve. A lot
can be done in search to make it a better experience," he
said.
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