Currently Microsoft gleans less than 10 percent of all Internet searches and less than five percent of Internet ad revenue from searches.

New Search Frontier

Nadella maintains that deeper, connected searches will yield better results and, hopefully, more satisfied Microsoft customers. He said nearly half of search users spend 30 minutes on a query looking for the right result.

While current search technology can use the previous search results, Nadella believes interrelated and deeper queries can get accurate results faster. Such tailored searches can be achieved by looking over multiple searches and histories.

Nadella also indicated that search could evolve from merely seeking results to using search engines to perform actual work based on a query. How this could tie into, for example, Office or other applications was not detailed.

Kitchen Sink Approach

The presentation was part of Microsoft's push to gain a respectable foothold in the lucrative search and online ad market. The company has attempted everything from innovation to acquisition to further this goal. In the past nine months the software giant has been foiled three times in its bid to take over rival Yahoo's search business.

In April it acquired start-up Farecast.com, an airfare search company, and quickly rolled it into Microsoft Live Search. And what speaks louder than cash? Microsoft unveiled a Live Search cash-back program in the spring, giving customers discounts on millions of items when using the Live Search engine to find products.

The most significant acquisition, however, may be Powerset, a San Francisco-based natural-language software developer. According to a Microsoft blog post on July 21 after the Powerset buy was announced, "search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a Web page. We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a Web page. Doing so, we can innovate in the quality of the search results, in the flexibility with which searchers can phrase their queries, and in the search user experience."

The incorporation of Powerset technology into Live Search seems to be the groundbreaking technology Nadella outlined in his address. Analysts predict that more than one of Microsoft's market strategies need to pay off for it to make any significant dent in Google's 70 percent market lead.