Bill Gates “We will build the world’s best search!”

Most of the news from last night’s All Things Digital conference in San Diego, concentrates on the short demo Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer gave of the Windows 7 ‘touch‘ interface.
For me, the most interesting thing about the evening, was a comment Bill Gates made to reporters at an earlier reception. After explaining that he will still have an office at Redmond, he went on to say that he would continue working on a number of pet projects.
Then he said something, which I think is really interesting;
“I’m very involved in search, the internal development,” he said. “We will build the world’s best search.”
Like many people, I was disappointed when Microsoft recently announced that it was going to use what it refers to as a ‘cash back‘ model, to try to gain some marketshare from Google; rather than innovate and make something better.
As Om Malik told the BBC this week; “Microsoft is like a bad restaurant – no matter what the incentive, you don’t want to eat there.
I hope that Bill Gates‘ comments yesterday are a sign that he IS serious about competing with Google, by making a better search product. I certainly hope! As I have already blogged, Google’s near monopoly in the search marketplace is good for no one other than Google.