Whatever happened to differentiation? I guess Microsoft doesn’t think there is any for their search engine, live.com.
The latest talk that Microsoft is offering to pay companies for searches on their 3rd ranked search engine, live.com is sad.
Microsoft needs a USP (unique selling proposition– yes its an old term but still very appropriate). What makes their search engine different?
Whats even more amazing is that they don’t even need any more content, just a little programming.
Lets see, they own Expedia…how about live-travel-search.com or something like that? or how about foodsearch.com? Something to differentiate them.
They should study their searches to find out the most popular categories and create search engines based on popular searches.
Even better…how about topical search engines on the fly? For example the pet food recalls are one of the top stories; why not create a system to automatically create targeted search engines on the fly. For example a user could just type in live.com/petrecall and get a summary page of all key info on the pet recall. This would be great for news sites too.
The bottom line is companies do not utilize the resources they already have very well.
Millions of dollars are "buried" in companies assets and resources…the only question is who is going to mine them- you or your competition.