Microsoft has announced that it will establish a new European search technology center, but Norway is not listed as one of the options.

Yahoo! is not the only company stumbling around as a confused and dazed kid in the search engine store.

Microsoft is doing its best to catch up with Google in the search engine technology space: The Live Search team has definitely mad progress, and Live Search is more than a decent search tool, but it has still not found its own identity (or a brand name that communicates, for that matter).

Now Microsoft is looking to Europe for help.

In a press release this week Microsoft announced that the company “plans to open a Search Technology Center (STC) in Europe in its fiscal year 2009. The new center will be designed to help accelerate Microsoft’s investments in Live Search and disrupt the search and advertising marketplace.”

The obvious place to put such a center would be Trondheim or Oslo, Norway, the homes of Fast Search and Transfer, the enterprise search company recently bought by Microsoft.

The university in Trondheim, NTNU, harbors one of Europe’s strongest search engine research environments.

The press release does not mention Norway, however:

The location of the European STC has yet to be announced; however, several cities are currently being considered as the hub, with the expectation that a smaller numbers of engineers contributing to the STC could be placed in multiple countries, possibly including, for example, the
United Kingdom, France and Germany. The goal is to create a highly versatile and challenging European center of excellence for Microsoft’s research and development leaders.

Norway is not even mentioned as a possible location.

The reason might be found in the one of the next paragraphs:

“We’re already doing some great work in Europe in the enterprise search space through our January 2008 acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer SA, and we’re looking forward to opening the
European Search Technology Center to further our investments.”

So it seems Microsoft looks at enterprise search as something separate from web search and Live.

That is strange, not only because the underlying technology is very similar, but also because Fast was the developer of AlltheWeb, one of the very few search engines that once managed to match Google quality wise.

(AlltheWeb was bought by Overture, which then was acquired by Yahoo! Yahoo failed to make use of the Fast expertise in any sensible way.)

Microsoft Plans European Search Center (Beyond Search)