Well, Microsoft has finally relased their "Newsbot" beta (read about it here). I read about it on Google news, which I have come to rely upon.
This will be interesting.
At first glance, Microsoft has a lot of catching-up to do. Plus, this is a strange space. Differentiating one site from the other, in terms of content, is challenging. Both "current news" pages have surprisingly little overlap at this point, and the methods used for choice of headlines is, at best, mysterious.
Aside from Google's headstart, Microsoft has various liabilities in this game.
First, Microsoft has immediately forfieted their right to be trusted. Of the 20 stories on the main page of NewsBot, 9 of them are from MSNBC. Other sources are listed, but the MSNBC story is preferred. Plus, the past two "headline" stories I've seen are from MSNBC. If Microsoft is looking to compete with Google News, they will have to work much harder to give the impression of impartiality to their own purposes. In that regard, Microsoft always starts off as a suspect and Newsbot is doing nothing to discourage that view.
Second, Microsoft has a lot of technology catch-up to do. Searching for "Newsbot" on Google News not only retrieves more recent information about the Microsoft product than Microsoft's own offering. In addition, the Google "consolidation" of multiple sources into a single headline looks uncannily like the kind of thing a human editor would do. It is intelligent, easy to understand, and no space is wasted with multiple "hits" which really are the same information restated by other sources. The first Google News result covers today's news (with quick and non-distracting links to all related stores), the second article skips back a few days to the next most recent "news event" related to Newsbot.
By contrast, a search on Newsbot for "newsbot" itself, yields a dry and repetitive "search engine result" which contains many redundant result "hits". There is no attempt at automated editorial treatment. It is instantly annoying, and forces you to decide whether the results are relevant or not.
Google has some motivated software engineers with their brains in overdrive---Google News is smart and gets the details right. Microsoft is still trying to explain to their employees why they recently cut benefits to employees while paying shareholder dividends of history-making proportions. Newsbot is very, very green.
Aside from the above, Newsbot shows many "Beta level" problems. It looks terrible in some browsers, and probably great in the browsers "the developers used while creating it". But, beta doesn't mean what it used to. Customers are quick to judge and if Microsoft improves the release version, they will have to live with the reputation of the Beta for a long time. Google is also Beta, though it has been for two years!!
My quick take...
Google's strategy: "undercommit and overdeliver"
Microsoft's: "ship it quick, use our marketing clout, tie it to our other offerings, make it better later".
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