travel, hotel and booking Information

MSN Announces Investment in Search Technology

Personal Search Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Is Added to MSN Search Arsenal

Hotel Booking REDMOND, Wash. -- July 16, 2004 -- MSN today announced that it has acquired Lookout Software LLC, bringing additional technology and expertise to future search efforts by MSN. Lookout offers the critically acclaimed Lookout personal search tool for the Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 messaging and collaboration client, which provides fast searching for e-mail, files and desktop data within Outlook. This investment builds on several significant product improvements and milestones reached by the MSN Search team recently, including changes to MSN Search that increase the relevancy of many results by up to 45 percent.
"Lookout has developed an innovative technology for searching e-mail that is aligned with our own MSN Search efforts," said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of MSN. "Our vision is to take search beyond today's basic Internet search services to deliver direct answers to people's questions, and help them find information from a broad range of sources. We are thrilled to add the expertise of the Lookout team to our existing team of search experts."

Are you running an online travel site or travel agency and looking for a professional partner for online hotel bookings Then follow the example of more than 12, 000 of your colleagues and join our attractive affiliate programme and benefit from the growing segment of hotel reservations on the internet! As an online hotel reservation service, TravelRes has the speaking countries. Each day, more than one million customers make thousands of hotel bookings with our unique service covering over 210, 000 hotels throughout the world. based vicinity search.

Travel Agency The acquisition of Lookout, founded by Mike Belshe and Eric Hahn, adds expertise to the MSN vision of offering the best search tools to help people find information. As part of the acquisition, Lookout founder and software developer Belshe will become a full-time employee on the MSN Search team. Founder and software developer Hahn will work closely with the MSN Search team during the transition of Lookout to Microsoft.

OAG, the global travel and transport information company, announced today the addition of a new online hotel £ook and book service on its travel web site, www.oag.com. World Choice Travel, a division of the Travelocity Partner Network, powers the reservation system.

Cheap Hotel "It's truly exciting to be joining the MSN Search team," Belshe said. "With Microsoft's focus in the search arena, we feel this is a great opportunity to expand on the technology we have built in a way that will really help consumers. MSN's own cutting-edge technology combined with Lookout and other upcoming products is going to fundamentally change this industry in a very positive way."

shop travel booking engine searching for you the best travel deals throughout the entire web. Hotel search and booking capability through the most innovative satellite map searching system Earn easy money with zero investment and no technical know how. Commissions paid immediately after customer's date of booking. No delays like with other affiliate programs.

Flight Booking "Our goal was to build simple, high-quality tools that empower people to spend less time processing e-mail," Hahn said. "I'm very thankful to the large community of people that provided feedback and support to our efforts, which ultimately resulted in continuous improvements to the Lookout software."

SpaFinder represents the finest resort, hotel and destination spas around the world. With the Travel Marketing Program you'll receive a detailed profile on Spafinder.com with full contact information, exposure to our travel agent network, inclusion in our powerful spa search engine and more. Our Program is designed to send booking requests and reservations calls directly to your spa. 1202.

Travel Agent Strong Momentum for MSN Search

Find and book unique hotels around the world with Kuoni Travel, Britain's best luxury travel and tour operator.

Hotel Chicago This acquisition builds on the range of new and updated services MSN launched July 1 for its MSN Search service. As part of a $100 million investment in improving the customer experience, MSN delivered its most significant upgrade to MSN Search, introducing several changes designed to help give people faster, cleaner and easier access to the information they want. Specific improvements included a new MSN Search home page (at http://search.msn.com/) that features easy navigation to popular MSN services; a new, cleaner look for its search results page that separates algorithmic results from paid results and eliminates paid inclusion; direct access to popular information sources such as Encarta, the No. 1 best-selling encyclopedia brand*; and extensive performance improvements.

Online Booking These improvements were initial steps toward achieving the MSN vision of taking search beyond today's basic Internet search services to delivering direct answers to people's questions from a broad range of information. As part of this vision, MSN will launch a new algorithmic search engine and a range of other search services within a year. With the acquisition of Lookout, MSN adds additional expertise and technology that will contribute to this vision.

Travel Health Insurance About MSN

Hotel Reservation MSN attracts more than 350 million unique users worldwide per month. With localized versions available globally in 38 markets and 18 languages, MSN is a world leader in delivering Web services to consumers and online advertising opportunities to businesses worldwide. The most useful and innovative online service today, MSN brings consumers everything they need from the Web to make the most of their time online. MSN is located on the Web at http://www.msn.com/. MSN worldwide sites are located at http://www.msn.com/worldwide.ashx

London Hotel Booking About Microsoft

Discount Travel Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Orlando Hotel * NPDTechWorldSM, March 1993-March 2004. Based on total U.S. retail sales.

Booking Agency Microsoft, MSN, Outlook and Encarta are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

International Travel Medical The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

[ Comment, Edit or Article Submission ]