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Google Invades Microsoft's Turf Search Engine Plans Software for PCs

Posted on: Thursday, 20 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

Edging closer to a direct confrontation with Microsoft, Google, the Web search engine, is preparing to introduce a powerful file and text software search tool for locating information stored on personal computers.

Google's software, which is expected to be introduced soon, according to several people with knowledge of the company's plans, is the clearest indication to date that the company, based in Mountain View, California, hopes to extend its search business to compete directly with Microsoft's control of desktop computing.

Improved technology for searching information stored on a PC will also be a key feature of Microsoft's long-delayed version of its Windows operating system called Longhorn. That version, which is not expected before 2006 at the earliest, will have a redesigned file system, making it possible to track and retrieve information in ways not currently possible with Windows software.

Google's move is in part a defensive one, because the company is concerned about Microsoft's ability to make searching on the Web as well as on a PC a central part of its future operating system. By integrating more search functions into Windows, Microsoft could conceivably challenge Google the way it threatened, and destroyed, an earlier rival, Netscape, by incorporating Web browsing into the Windows 98 operating system.

A Google spokesman declined to comment about the new search tool.

The Google software project, which is code-named Puffin and which will be available as a free download from Google's Web site, has been running internally at the company for about a year.

Microsoft's Windows Longhorn, according to industry analysts, will dispense with the need for a stand-alone browser. The disappearance of the Web browser and the integration of both Web search and PC search into the Windows operating system could potentially marginalize Google's search engine. Google, well aware of this threat, hired a Microsoft product manager last year to oversee the Puffin project as part of its strategy to compete with Microsoft's incursion into its territory.

Microsoft has shown demonstrations of its new search technology, which emphasizes the use of natural language in queries like Where are my vacation photos? or What is a firewall? Microsoft believes that Longhorn users will no longer think about where information is stored; they will instead see a unified view of documents stored on both the Internet and on the desktop.

The confrontation between Microsoft and Google is coming as Microsoft prepares to introduce its own advanced Web search service, possibly later this year.

The company is revising its MSN strategy and backing away from its Internet dial-up service, looking instead to get more revenue from the search advertising market that Google dominates.

Web and PC-based searching is a particularly thorny subject for Microsoft because the company's chairman, Bill Gates, first outlined the idea of information at your fingertips in a speech given at a computer industry trade show in 1990. Yet the company did little to innovate in the areas of Internet search or text and file searches on the PC until it discovered how profitable searching had become for Google.

Google's strategy is to move quickly while Microsoft is still developing its Longhorn version of Windows, adding programs and services like its recently announced Gmail, Google's cost-free electronic mail program.

The intent, say people who are familiar with the company's strategy, is to lower its vulnerability to Microsoft by adding businesses that are sticky in other words, businesses that create strong customer loyalty or are hard to switch away from.

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