News

Microsoft Buys Mobile Search Company

Microsoft came late to desktop search; it doesn’t intend to make the same mistake with mobile search. The company announced Monday that it has bought MotionBridge, a French maker of "mobile search" technology. The press release didn’t say how much Microsoft paid for the company.

MotionBridge is a search engine for small screens like PDAs or cell phones. Its proposition is that normal search engines don’t list search results optimized for cellphone-sized displays -- they're too small for large lists of results, typing in keywords is tedious, and result descriptions won’t fit on a screen. MotionBridge simplifies tasks, saving time and effort.

It would be hard to say that mobile search is a "hot" technology right now, but most of the major players have some form of it in use, or have plans in the works. Google, for instance, has Google Short Message Service (SMS), which lets a user send a query through a cellphone browser -- say, for a restaurant -- and get a text message answer listing the restaurant’s name, address and phone number, but no link.

Yahoo! has a similar service, but also has a more MotionBridge-like service called Yahoo! Search on Mobile. Both the Yahoo! and MotionBridge offerings are more like a severely streamlined Web browsing experience. The search engine Ask Jeeves is also rumored to be jumping into the mobile search space.

Now with MotionBridge in the fold, Microsoft has a foothold in another aspect of search. It’s also beefing up its search capabilities in Vista, the next-generation operating system, still scheduled for release late this year. Microsoft has been a step or two behind Google in search technology, something even CEO Steve Ballmer has admitted. This latest play may help it pull even, at least in the mobile search market.

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

Featured

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.