MSN decided several months ago it was time to create its own technology instead of relying on search companies Inktomi and Overture, said Kirk Koenigsbauer, general manager of MSN.com.
He said it was unrelated to Yahoo's acquisitions in the last year of Inktomi and Overture.
Rather, Microsoft saw how important search has become, Koenigsbauer said, and contends that no one is really doing a good job sorting through the mass of Web sites to answer queries.
Indeed, if Microsoft can build a better search engine, "it's wide open at this point," said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research.
Koenigsbauer would not say when Microsoft's new search tool will appear, or what technical changes Microsoft is making to improve search.
"That's the secret sauce," he said.
But he said better personalization is one way to improve searching. For example, if MSN knows that the computer user searching for "pizza" lives in a specific postal code, it can deliver results of pizza places in that postal code.
Beyond satisfying consumers, better searching can be lucrative.
Many companies pay or bid for inclusion in search sites' listings -- typically in a cordoned-off section for advertisers -- based on the key words the user enters. Such paid listings are expected to generate more than US$2 billion in revenue for search sites this year, Li said.
Although Microsoft has not revealed many details about its new Longhorn operating system, the company has said it plans to build a unified file system that allows a quick search across everything in a computer, regardless of whether it is an e-mail or other specialized document.
Dumais and other Microsoft researchers are studying how people narrow down their searches for documents they've seen before and want to retrieve -- using special dates as a memory cue or the sender of the document as an identifying characteristic.
Others, led by Gordon Bell in Microsoft Research's lab in San Francisco, are looking at how to build what amounts to a computer backup for people's memories. Bell has developed a way to store phone calls, bills, pictures and music on a computer hard drive, with a search tool that can sort through it all.
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