Billed as the first major redesign in a decade, Microsoft has introduced a dramatic new look and feel for the MSN portal. The redesign simplifies and cleans up most elements on the site. Among other things, it makes video more central, incorporates Facebook and Twitter, creates a dedicated new local area and emphasizes search.

MSN, which Microsoft says now has 600 million users globally (which would make it larger than Yahoo), is a huge asset for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it drives roughly 45% of Bing’s queries. Even a cursory look at the old and new MSN homepages reveals the superiority of the new design:

After users log in and grant access to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, the activity streams of both sites appear in the lower right of the MSN homepage (the blank area above):

The new local edition does a nice job of aggregating a range of local content (e.g., restaurants and entertainment, news, film, traffic, gas prices, etc.) and presenting it in a direct and accessible manner, with maps and local search functionality as well.

Microsoft told me that the redesign was prompted by user feedback and a growing internal sense that the old design was cluttered and had grown stale. When I met with Microsoft we also discussed and compared the Yahoo homepage redesign of several months ago. The most prominent feature of the Yahoo homepage redesign is the left column of widgets or apps, which ask users to select and personalize the page accordingly.

Microsoft expressed skepticism that lots of people will in fact get involved with a high degree of explicit personalization like this. There will, however, be personalization on MSN but it will not be as obvious to end users as the personalization elements on the Yahoo site. Microsoft will be offering “smart headlines” based on user location, behavior and demographic segment.

The new MSN will roll out globally over the next several months. Interestingly the look of the MSN portal may be slightly different country to country, depending on variables unique to each local market. Microsoft also says that it will bring the new MSN experience to mobile devices as well.

I haven’t systematically gone through every link and page in the new MSN site but from what I’ve been able to look at, it’s a big improvement over the former design.

If Microsoft enjoys success with the new MSN site it’s likely to directly benefit Bing. Previously many users were reportedly abandoning MSN for Google to conduct search queries. That’s probably less likely to happen now. But we’ll see what transpires over the next month or two. Regardless the new design makes MSN a much better place to visit.

Here’s a review of MSN designs over the past several years. See also related discussion on Techmeme.

Acer to Produce Netbook Using Google Operating System from the Wall Street Journal reports that Google’s Android operating system, used on Google Phones, will be shipped on Acer’s Netbooks.

The new low-cost computers will ship in the third quarter of this year. This does not mean Acer will stop shipping computers with Windows, it just gives Acer an alternative low-cost option for their Netbooks.

We knew this was coming when Greg wrote, Report: Android OS Coming To Netbooks. There are also rumors that Dell’s netbooks will run Android in the future.

LiveSide reports Microsoft has decided to close down the Question and Answer portal, MSN QnA as of May 21st. Microsoft said:

At this time, we are closing the QnA site, but the experience of running QnA and gathering all of the great feedback you’ve shared with us will certainly influence future product direction.

QnA initially launched as a beta in August 2006 and we even rated it fairly well in December 2006. QnA had a major upgrade about a year ago today.

Google had their own Questions and Answers which they closed down in 2006. Yahoo Answers is still very dominate in this area.

Next month Microsoft will relaunch its search engine or launch its new search engine (currently dubbed Kumo/Kiev) together with a new marketing campaign to promote it. The question on everyone’s minds is: will it change anything?

Despite a range of efforts so far Redmond has not been able to boost its market share in search. Speaking yesterday at Stanford University, where he attended business school, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said:

“We are going to have to be more disruptive” in search.

Cashback is part of that equation for Microsoft — as in disruption of the traditional advertising model. But Ballmer also said that Microsoft will be taking more “risks” in search going forward. He opined that because Google is the market leader it has to be more conservative than Microsoft, almost by definition, because Google is protecting more revenue in search. While that’s true as a matter of abstract logic, Google probably has “risk taking” or “experimentation” more deeply engrained in its corporate culture than Microsoft does.

Microsoft in fact could do some radical things in search and see what took hold. But from all appearances, radical change in search doesn’t seem to be the company’s path at this point.

I’ve argued in the past that Microsoft should attempt to buy Twitter and forget about Facebook. However that’s becoming more and more challenging as time passes. But there are other services that the company could build or buy that might take search in new directions along the lines of Twitter and beyond.

It would be great to see Microsoft really, truly experiment and place multiple search bets rather than one big bet. (Maybe the company would argue that it’s already doing this but I would disagree.) This is what nature does, in fact, with evolution. Some experiments succeed and some fail. But experimentation is key.

Microsoft is launching Vine today as a limited beta in Seattle only. It’s an interesting local/social communications and information tool that plays in the same sandbox as both Twitter and Facebook, and also competes to a degree with online news sites.

Vine is Windows-only software that’s intended to sit open on your desktop so that users can keep in touch with people, events, and news happening around them. Microsoft is providing printable invite cards so users can get more out of the app by having friends and family in the beta, as well.

Vine’s dashboard shows a map of your area and the current status of contacts also using Vine. There are additional screens to let users send reports or alerts, although the current documentation isn’t too clear on the difference between those options.

To some degree, existing tools like email, Twitter, and Facebook have become the default way we send out updates to friends, family, and others in our network. Vine users can send alerts and reports via the software, text message, or email, and the fact sheet seems to suggest that the app will be expanded in the future to allow updating via other services.

An application that can connect with other social services, allow both sending and receiving of data to and from those services, pull in local news from media outlets and other feeds (like local blogs, say), and add local context to all of that data in the form of mapping … now that could become a very compelling tool.

The Seattle Times reports that Microsoft’s current focus is on getting local government and emergency management officials to use the tool to broadcast important updates during disasters and other major events. Vine, the article says, is launching with data feeds from more than 20,000 media outlets and public safety organizations such as the NOAA and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Vine is free for individuals at the moment, although Microsoft says on the Vine FAQ that “organizations and individuals will be able to purchase additional services in the future.” The Seattle Times adds that future Vine betas are planned for two other unnamed areas — one in the Midwest, and one island community.

There’s more Vine discussion on Techmeme.

TechCrunch reported late last night that Twitter was in late stage talks to be acquired by Google. That sent what used to be called the “blogosphere” into a frenzy. Kara Swisher, of AllThingsD, striking back against what she believes was sloppy journalism (and TechCrunch more generally), said no:

In fact, Twitter and Google have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service.

Said a source close to Twitter: “There was a discussion with [Google executive Marissa Mayer's] group about real-time search and about product stuff. It was a couple weeks ago. It was very preliminary…and that was that.”

Almost immediately the “Google vs. Microsoft: who will win?” discussion kicked back in. However, I agree with TechFlash’s Todd Bishop that Microsoft should be looking seriously at Twitter, which has already become an arguably more effective marketing vehicle than Facebook (which unsuccessfully tried to buy the site in an all stock deal). Twitter would still be a fraction of the cost that it would take to acquire Facebook.

Assuming Swisher is correct that there are product-level discussions between Twitter and Google about incorporating Twitter content (tweets) into Google results, it’s a smart thing for both companies. Often a “strategic partnership” is a prelude to an acquisition however. And we can say with almost 100 percent certainty that Twitter will be acquired; it’s just on too much of a tear to not be.

Even though it has almost completely disappeared from the market otherwise, the old logic is operating in this case: “I have to get that asset or my competitor will.”

Postscript: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone was on The Colbert Report last night and said that Twitter was going to remain an “strong, independent” company and that the service would be extended globally to the world’s “four billion mobile phones.” He also said the company would begin “experimenting” with revenue models this year and likened the company’s trajectory to Google.

Does that mean he’s thinking about an IPO in the future or is that simply the requisite talk that we would expect him to make in a public setting? The fact that there were serious acquisition discussions between Facebook and Twitter does strongly suggest that the company is thinking about allowing itself to be acquired (certainly the investors are thinking that way). An IPO for Twitter, even if it had 200 million users around the world still seems very unlikely.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: A key question is whether Google would even be allowed to acquire Twitter, if it wanted. Microsoft led the lobbying to stop the Google-Yahoo ad partnership deal from happening, and that wasn’t even an aquisition. With Twitter now one of the important and new areas of search (real time search), I’d expect any attempt by Google to acquire it to be challenged by Microsoft as giving Google yet too much control over search. I’d also expect Microsoft to get into a bidding war for Twittter, but the anti-trust threat also gives them a stick to go with any carrot they wanted to dangle in front of Twitter.

When the long rumored Google Health was announced in early 2008, it appeared to be a very ambitious initiative that had a mountain to climb. That mountain was participation: getting individuals, doctors and hospitals to digitize their records. Then there are the myriad privacy and data security issues.

But Google isn’t the only one in the electronic health records and “health search” game. So is Microsoft. There are scores of others in the segment, as well as billions spent annually in advertising. Despite the money and involvement of companies like Microsoft and Google, digitizing the nation’s health records and getting millions of people to use online tools to manage their health histories seemed an almost insurmountable goal in early 2008.

Then came the election of Barack Obama.

As part of its economic recovery program, the Obama Administration has proposed a multi-billion dollar effort to upgrade the US health care system by making all health records electronic within five years. The idea is that over time it saves money, delivers efficiencies, helps improve the quality of healthcare and overall costs in the system will decline. That effort has given Google Health, Microsoft Health Vault and others a major hypothetical boost. But major challenges remain.

According to a story in the NY Times, two separate medical journal articles identify a range of problems and obstacles to achievement of the Obama Administration’s goal:

Two articles, to be published on Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, point to the formidable obstacles to achieving the policy goal of not only installing electronic health records, but also using them to improve care and curb costs.

One article reports that only 9 percent of the nation’s hospitals have electronic health records, based on a survey of nearly 3,000 hospitals . . .

In a second article in the journal, two experts in health information technology at Children’s Hospital Boston assert that spending billions of dollars of federal funds to stimulate the adoption of existing forms of health record software would be a costly policy mistake.

The second article advocates development of an open software platform rather than working within the existing records framework. It’s not clear to me how open-source software would affect Google or Microsoft’s health-related ambitions — probably not significantly.

Billions are literally at stake in answering these questions, however.

Eventually there will be an electronic database of health records in the US. That will certainly yield public and private health benefits as well as cost savings to the system. (Privacy and policy issues preventing abuse will have to be addressed as part of the effort.)

The big unknown is how long it will realistically take to develop that system and whether, if it takes many years, Google or Microsoft will have the patience to wait that long.

Most of the bestselling laptops on Amazon’s computer bestseller list are so-called netbooks, computers which have little memory, are highly compact and more affordable than traditional laptops. Lighter and smaller, they’re largely for mobility and internet use.

Their appearance and popularity are are consistent with trends toward “cloud computing” (e.g., Google Apps) and mobile internet access (i.e., iPhone/Android). Many of these computers run the Microsoft XP OS but many run Linux. Now it appears Android is eying this market as well, according to a report appearing in VentureBeat, which predicts an Android OS netbook by 2010.

Assuming it’s true this marks an interesting development for the open-source OS. Android’s creators have always seen it as a broader platform than for just smartphones. Back when the Open Handset Alliance was announced and Android formally launched in November 2007 there were allusions to non-phone uses of Android. As I said at the time of the original post:

On the conference call held this morning . . . the other thing that I found interesting was a throwaway reference to devices and uses of Android that haven’t yet been contemplated. Schmidt, and I believe Rubin, suggested that the platform could be used in ways that have little to do with mobile phones. That’s an intriguing scenario: What would those devices and uses be? I’m sure there are some thoughts in the minds of some people at the Googleplex or on a whiteboard somewhere . . .

Netbooks is one answer.

Roughly 13 years ago Oracle’s mercurial CEO Larry Ellison championed the idea of a low-cost PC or PDA (<$500) that would be used chiefly to access the internet and would have little software on machine itself. He was taking aim at rival Microsoft in pushing the notion. Ellison’s vision has now been realized with the advent of netbooks, whose popularity will continue to exert downward price pressure on conventional laptops (now outselling desktop PCs).

Analysts and press have gotten endless mileage out of the Google vs. Microsoft storyline, which has become much more real with the development of Android as a direct competitor to Windows Mobile and the release of Google’s browser Chrome. One “unnamed HTC executive” recently was quoted saying that Android was adversely affecting Windows Mobile sales:

The HTC executive has also admitted that the new Google offering is hurting sales of Windows Mobile devices of which HTC are the biggest maker in the world.

For the time being, Microsoft has nothing to fear from Android on netbooks. However, longer term what this represents is more OS diversification that may contribute to erosion of Microsoft’s hold on the PC market.

Can a search engine accurately diagnose health problems? Can it someday replace your doctor? Questions like this aren’t new, but the discussion has gotten a bit louder in recent weeks.

Just a couple weeks ago, I reported on a Microsoft investigation of cyberchondria, when inaccurate medical information online makes actual health problems worse. On Friday, Dilbert cartoon creator Scott Adams shared a different point of view, telling blog readers how Google helped him find treatment for a speech defect known as Spasmodic Dysphonia.

More specifically, Adams was using Google Alerts to get information about the condition. Google notified him of an “obscure medical publication” that wrote about Spasmodic Dysphonia. He took the information to his own doctor, was referred from there to other doctors, and eventually had successful surgery to fix the voice defect.

“I never would have found that path without Google Alerts,” Adams writes.

But is his story representative of what typically happens when we use the Internet to search for medical information? The Microsoft paper released last month explained that using the Internet to diagnose health problems can make the problem worse than it really is:

“… the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web.”

About 30% of people in the Microsoft study experience “heightened anxiety” because of what they learn online after doing a web search about medical conditions. But Adams says he’s used the Internet — “Dr. Google” as he calls it — “dozens of times to diagnose various minor medical problems, or to find out what things are dangerous or not.” And he poses some interesting questions about how well the Internet could diagnose non-emergency medical problems, both common and uncommon:

“With the uncommon problems, such as my spasmodic dysphonia, I have to wonder if Google (or WebMD, etc.) can do a better job than a doctor, if not now then maybe in the near future. If you could call up videos of people with identical symptoms, couldn’t you diagnose most of your own problems?

For example, are you any worse than your doctor at looking at High Definition pictures of a skin problem and comparing it to your own skin problem?

My guess is that the Internet could equal your doctor in diagnosing uncommon problems. WebMD for example asks a bunch of diagnostic questions and narrows down your symptoms just as a doctor would. That system will only improve over time.

Adams goes on to wonder about using an online database to handle prescriptions, with pharmacist oversight built-in. Something like that may already be included in government discussions of a national health database; I don’t follow the details enough to know for sure if it is or not.

Ultimately, it’s an interesting discussion. Adams’ concept of “Dr. Google” doesn’t seem too outlandish, but — to borrow a common medical analogy — four out of five doctors would probably disagree.

Those muscle twitches you get probably aren’t a sign that you have ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”). But if you’re using search engines to diagnose what ails you, there’s a chance you’ll come to that conclusion.

In a new paper, Microsoft investigates cyberchondria: “… the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web.”

Microsoft researchers Ryen White and Eric Horvitz studied a 40-million page sample of search results (from Live Search) and surveyed 500 Microsoft employees about how they search for health information. They found that health search on the web sometimes makes our problems worse, in the form of heightened anxiety that can disrupt other aspects of normal, daily life. In other words, the information we learn from search engines often adds stress to whatever our current health problem might be.

“…the unreliability of Web sources and the content of Web search engine result pages contributed to the heightened anxiety of around three in ten survey respondents.

The responses show that search engine result pages, the contents of the pages visited directly from the result pages, and pages visited thereafter, may all contribute to health-related anxiety to different extents.”

One problem, according to the paper, is that web searches for common symptoms sometimes lead to information about serious, rare illnesses. A search for “headache” might lead to information about tension, but could also lead to information about brain tumors, which are extremely rare; a search for “chest pain” can lead to information about heartburn or heart attacks.

The paper puts the burden of responsibility for reducing this escalation of anxiety onto the search engines themselves:

“Search engine architects have a responsibility to ensure that searchers do not experience unnecessary concern generated by the ranking algorithms their engines use. They must be cognizant of the potential problems caused by cyberchondria, and focused on serving medical search results that are reliable, complete, and timely, as well as topically relevant.”

The 32-page research paper is available for download here. There’s also more discussion on Techmeme.