China Tech News reports:

Ma Weiying, principal researcher and research area manager for Microsoft (MSFT) Research Asia in Beijing, says that Microsoft has arranged a large team for the development of search engines in China and expects to make some achievements in the field in the coming years.

Ma told local media that though Microsoft’s Internet and search strategy still lags behind of that Google and other search engine providers, the company sees lots of open opportunities for developing search engines in China, as well as in the international market. Ma says there is still a lot of space for the innovation and development of search services, so Microsoft Research Asia will continue to enlarge its investment in the sector.

With reports that Baidu and Google have respectively around 60% and 25% of China’s internet search market, Microsoft is going to have to come up with something pretty darn innovative to get anywhere. The next big thing, mobile search, is already being sewn up between Baidu and Google, so the horizon looks distinctly cloudy for Microsoft.

So what are they looking into?

At present, there are more than 100 employees at Microsoft working on search related businesses in China. Under Ma’s leadership, the team is pushing the boundaries of current search technologies by leveraging machine learning and knowledge discovery techniques to deliver the next generation of Web search. This includes projects in information analysis, organization, retrieval, and visualization. Over the past few years, the team has generated an impressive record of conference publications, including key papers at SIGIR, WWW, and ACM Multimedia. The research has included direct transfers to products, including key technologies delivered to Windows Live image search, product search, mobile search, and academic search.

No disrespect to Microsoft’s researchers (I’m certainly not capable of judging the quality of their work) but over the past few years this has got Microsoft nowhere commercially.

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