Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘MSN Search Engine’ Category

Search engine watch reports that MSN is opening its pay per click program and is now looking for takers. The pilot is invite only, but you can hope to get picked by signing-up here. 

The sponsored ads will rotate in on a portion (25 percent) of MSN’s pages, with the rest still coming from Yahoo Search Marketing/Overture.

Reuters article about the possibilty that Microsoft and AOL might team up.  Though the article states the sale is at least two months from completion – and thus not a done deal – the potential of this merger could be a big play in the industry.

ZDNet Asia reports on MSN Paid Search that details the launch in Singapore, with France to follow and a MSN Keywords pilot in the US in October. 

According to Eva Balan, MSN’s international marketing manager for MSN adCenter, advertisers pay a one-time subscription fee of S$5 (US$3) for MSN Keywords.

For each keyword, they bid a minimum of S$0.10 and pay for the number of times search users click on their advertisements, which appear as sponsored links alongside search results. The placement of the links will depend on the bid price, click-through rate as well as the types of user profiles captured by the system.

MSN announced on its blog that they are crawling certain feeds in order to index breaking news as quickly as possible.

One of the key elements of having a great index is having fresh content.  If someone searches for Vista on the day that we announced the name for the next version of Windows then they should be able to see relevant results. 

This means that we need to have the content in our index within minutes of these types of events happening. In order to do this we built a simple crawler to get News and Blogs that break this type of news.

Search Engine Watch has a post about penalties imposed at Yahoo and Msn for spam like activities, which can get your web site banned. I personally dont think Yahoo or MSN is doing enough because I see spam like sites all the time in those seach indexes.

In Yahoo’s guidelines pages for webmasters, the following is considered spam:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
• Lots of pages that were automatically generated or of little value
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

The bottom line is that you should never do anything that any of the search engines might consider spam. You really don’t have to because as long as your site is search engine friendly and optimized, has good content and has links from other related sites, then you should be able to get good listings for your legal site.

The WSJ reports that next week MSN will announce a new ad program called MSN Keywords and this is another example of how MSN is trying to mimic Google and encroach on its search territory.

Microsoft next week will announce that an invitation-only test of MSN Keywords will begin in October with 500 advertisers and search-engine marketing specialists. The service will move MSN closer to how Google handles advertising, by using live auctions of keywords. MSN Keywords is one tool of a broader set of new advertising services called adCenter that Microsoft is building on MSN. Microsoft executives say they hope the tools will allow companies to tailor advertisements by giving them more detailed information on Web users than is currently available.

Reuters reports that a Washington state judge temporarily blocked a former Microsoft VP from starting work at Google.

A Washington state judge on Thursday temporarily blocked a former Microsoft Corp. vice-president from heading up rival Google Inc.’s new research center in China.

The ruling by Kings County Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez marked a small victory in a wider battle to keep Kai-Fu Lee from working at Google.

Microsoft sued Lee and Google last week, claiming the former head of its Beijing research and development center had violated his employment contract by agreeing to take a job at Google.

The Seattle Times has a nice summary of the new MSN search engine. The report looks at the many failures, successes and the continued developments.

I like MSN and think its a solid search engine but feel it has a long way to go before it can ever close the gap with Google. This report seems to confirm that. Here are some interesting quotes from the MSN summary.

- A few months ago, when asked why the company had used technology from rivals to run its search engine, he admitted something rarely heard from Microsoft’s top brass: "We were stupid as hell."

- Microsoft didn’t just miss the boat in search technology. It missed the dock.

Critics seemed to like MSN’s offering, but most acknowledged that it would take more from MSN to topple Google from its perch.

"It’s a good product, but it is not at the same level as Google or even Yahoo yet," said Safa Rashtchy, an analyst covering the search industry for Piper Jaffray. MSN needs to boost the relevancy of its search results even more, he said.

So far, MSN’s new search engine hasn’t caused a vast market shift, but it appears to be growing in use faster than Google. From January to March, according to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings, Google’s market share went from 47.1 percent to 47.3 percent while MSN’s went from 12.8 percent to 13.6 percent.

Put aside for a moment the features and technical competency of each, and MSN has another barrier to hurdle: People are deeply devoted to Google.

Google has what Rashtchy calls the Kleenex factor: It is so well known that people say "Google" when they mean "search."

Business 2.0 talks about MSN Search’s recent market share growth and how much they have committed to this new advertising campaign.

According to Internet measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings, MSN’s share of the booming search-engine market jumped in February from 12.8 percent to 14.2 percent. That gain came at the expense of market leader Google (GOOG), which saw its share fall from 47.1 percent to 45.9 percent. (Yahoo (YHOO) held steady with a little more than 20 percent of the market.)

Its early and you would hope that MSN would gain some increased share because they spent $150 million dollars advertising the new MSN search engine. So I’m sure many people are now aware that Google isn’t the only search player, but its hard to make people switch over in the long run.

I have seen an increase in traffic from all of my sites at MSN over the last month, so no doubt MSN is working better. They are a serious player and will give Google a run, but its hard to envision them getting that much more then the current 14.2% market share.  Either way, its important for all legal sites to be included in not only Yahoo and Google, but MSN Search.

Article from AlwaysOn says that Microsoft is already in a good position to challenge Yahoo and Google in the paid search arena.

In its bid to challenge Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. at their own game, Microsoft Corp. says its entry into online advertising technology will offer marketers a "one-stop shop" that’s far more comprehensive than rival services.

MSN, with a 16 percent share of the paid-search market, is in third place behind industry leader Google , at 35 percent, and Yahoo , at 31.8 percent, according to research firm comScore Networks.