Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com), the world's largest software maker, announced on November 12 that its widely anticipated search engine, which launched in test mode on November 11, encountered some glitches on its first day. The new search engine, Microsoft's first assault on Google Inc.'s leading position in the market, returned "temporarily unavailable" messages to some users looking for answers to queries at its Web site at http://beta.search.msn.com.
Microsoft said in an emailed statement that in the process of making the new MSN Search Beta globally available, Microsoft experienced technical difficulties that rendered it unavailable for some consumers for periods of time. Microsoft said that it had expected such problems with MSN Search during its beta, and that there will be additional times when Microsoft limits service availability for maintenance purposes.
Microsoft had been working on its search engine for the last 18 months after deciding to challenge Google's leading position the market. Microsoft's said its new search engine would deliver results from a database index of more than 5 billion indexed Web documents and pages. Google, on the other hand, said on November 10 that it had nearly doubled its index database to 8 billion pages.
