Microsoft outlines 'three dimensional' search strategy

Microsoft's Bing holds nearly 10 per cent of the search market

Microsoft is touting a "three dimensional" search experience designed to give users more directions in finding the information they seek.

Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft's Bing search engine, told Channel 4 News Online that search should not just present results as links, but as knowledge.

"The whole point of search is to find something you don't know about, so why do we expect you to know it? We should help you on that journey," he said.

Weitz explained that this knowledge would be "licensed from a provider or calculated from our huge computer resource".

The Bing Twitter Search product, which gives access to all public tweets in real time, is another dimension of the three dimensional search strategy, Weitz said.

Weitz acknowledged Google had already brought the concept of "3D searching" into the mainstream with its Street View mapping tool.

Bing's creators are hoping that their "visual search" will create a similar experience in areas such as online shopping, perhaps to the exclusion of keywords altogether.

The latest figures from market research firm comScore reveal that Google continued to lead the US search market in October, although Microsoft had made considerable gains at the expense of Yahoo.

Google had a 65.4 per cent share of the market last month, a four per cent month-on-month increase, while Microsoft had 9.9 per cent, an eight per cent increase on November.