WebProNews

In a move that comes as no surprise to industry experts who've long been predicting a search engine battle between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Bill Gates announced at a Sydney media briefing that Microsoft plans to increase its search capability in July.

This news comes after Microsoft's announcement last March that it would in fact launch its own MSN search this July. One change will be clearer labeling of paid search listings.

By focusing on relevancy, will Microsoft be able to compete with Google? Discuss the search engine wars on WebProWorld.

Besides promising visual site changes and improvements in quality, Gates, Microsoft's founder, chairman and chief software architect, was quoted by ZDNet Australia as saying, ""It'll be later this year that we actually roll out what's entirely our own back end driving the search."

Calling the current search industry remarkably "low-tech," he hinted at a future of search where the engines actually understand the documents they index. Microsoft has already been researching linguistics in preparation for their upcoming transition into the competitive search industry, he said, and by doing this, Microsoft strives to make search "ten times better than it is today."

On June 12th, a Microsoft representative announced in a WebmasterWorld discussion that MSNbot currently supports an undocumented feature called "crawl delay," which lets webmasters "specify via robots.txt an amount of time (in seconds) that MSNBot should wait before retrieving another page from that host."

Microsoft, which topped the Customer Respect Group's list of American companies treating customers with respect, already has one advantage over Google: its popular Windows operating system. However, Google is currently the most popular search engine, having surpassed Yahoo for the top spot.

"The rate of improvement between us and them," Gates said, "will be highly beneficial to the consumer as we compete."

See what others are saying at the WebProNews e-Business forum, WebProWorld.

Brittany Thompson is an administrator for WebProWorld.com and contributes to the Insider Reports with her regular articles and interviews.