In a wide-ranging interview with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer waxed eloquently about a range of subjects including his view on the future of search. Despite a strange quirk in which he refused to mention Google by name, referring to them instead as "the incumbent," Ballmer revealed some juicy tidbits about where he sees search going in the next ten years. And of course, he expects Bing and Yahoo! to be right there every step of the way.

It's only natural

One idea that popped out during the interview was that of natural language processing, which lets you enter a question rather than keywords. The search engine should then understand the inferences of your words and help deliver a meaningful set of results. To my knowledge, there is no natural language processing in Bing yet, but there are some semantic elements as I wrote in this Semanticweb.com article recently. In some instances, Bing makes use of Powerset technology, a semantic search company that Microsoft purchased last year. The fact that Ballmer is referencing natural language technology, leads one to believe it's something they are working on for the future, and this could put some pressure on Google if that's true. (As I wrote last week, they are already working on ways to use pictures to filter through a large set of information.)

Looks matter

There is little doubt that the web version of Bing is an attractive interface, and by all reports, it's something that people like. Google uses a simple interface: Nothing but your query, a list of results and of course a smattering of Google Ads. Microsoft has gone out of its way to differentiate itself by making Bing an attractive interface. Ballmer said that he believes presentation matters. Of course, he would, because his company has concentrated on it. But it remains to be seen if that's really true, especially in the mobile environment where getting the facts and nothing but the facts is probably more important than how pretty the interface is.

Microsoft and Yahoo! can push Google

One big point Ballmer tried to make is that an unchecked Google is not good for innovation, a point I heartily agree with. Having a combined Microsoft and Yahoo! (should regulators pass the deal) means that the combined forces of these two companies will be put to bear on search, and that can only be good for search in general. While Google is continually innovating and looking at ways to improve search, it is only natural if it has a strong competitor that the competition will drive innovation across the space as the companies continually push one another.

For now, despite a dramatic point gain, Bing remains an also ran in the search engine race. Google controls somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 percent of all Internet searches, Yahoo! has around 20 percent and Bing has just 10 percent--up from around 8 percent. Sure, a two-point gain, in a short time is nothing to sneeze at, but neither is it reason for fear to echo in the halls of Google just yet. Even when Yahoo! and Microsoft complete their agreement, which calls for Yahoo! to use Bing as its underlying search engine for the next 10 years, the combined strength of the two companies is around 30 percent market share.

Microsoft may never catch Google, but as Ballmer says they can give them a push. When asked to predict Bing's market share in 10 years, Ballmer wisely refused to play that game with Arrington. He did, however, make it clear that Microsoft is in it for the long haul, no matter what happens. And that can only bode well for the future of search. - Ron