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Microsoft learns to crawl

Last year, the Microsoft chairman candidly credited Google with winning the first round of the search wars. "Google kicked our butts," he said.

Microsoft didn't just miss the boat in search technology. It missed the dock, the pier and the turnoff to the marina. The company has relentlessly pursued new businesses over the years, hoping to find another cash cow that could churn out revenue like its Windows and Office products.

That hit home for Microsoft in 2002. Google's revenues would reach $348 million that year and $962 million the next. Yahoo! was so hot on search that it soon would shell out $2 billion to buy search-engine companies Inktomi and Overture Services.

In early 2003, Moss and another developer set out to build a Web crawler — the online robot that would collect Web pages for gleaning by the future search engine. In his 16 years at Microsoft, Moss had never seen such a challenge.

"It was the hardest thing I'd ever looked at, technologywise," he said.

Google, meanwhile, had been perfecting search for five years and already had indexed more than 4 billion documents.

Nice article at : the seattle times

posted by What I Write @ Article