SEO for Microsoft Live Search (MSN)
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Microsoft is the latest major player in the search engine game. It came to the scene in 2004, and has since lost half of its market share to Google. Microsoft continues to treat search as a top priority, and as you've heard, attempted to buy Yahoo for $40+ billion. With an eight percent market share, Microsoft doesn’t send many visitors, but you can benefit from relatively easy SEO techniques.
In this article we cover Live Search's history, strategy and optimization.
Live Search, MSN, Windows Live
MSN (Microsoft Network) launched in August 24, 1995 as a consumer website and fought a portal battle with Yahoo, AOL, Lycos and other portals. Until 2004, Microsoft outsourced search to third party search engines; in July 2004 they launched their own search technology. They tweaked it until 2006 and then rebranded MSN Search to Live Search, confusing a lot of users.
I think this rebranding was one of their first mistakes, as MSN had a strong brand (portal, MSN messenger), while “Live” came out of the blue. Microsoft marketers (or whoever was in charge of branding) did not learn from Ford’s and Coke’s failed rebranding attempts, and are now stuck with a weaker brand than MSN.
Windows Live adds more to the overall confusion, as Microsoft expects users to recognize MSN, Live Search and Windows Live as distinct entities, even though all come from the same company. One wonders if the company's marketing department was out to lunch when these decisions were made.
Microsoft's search engine is Live.
Quality of Search Results
Web Search
Live search's quality varies, sometimes very strangely. Some of their search results are as good as other search engines, while others are outright full of spam. For instance financial and celebrity queries return quality, useful results (from what I saw when I tested), while many competitive adult queries show outright spam and 404s (even though the adult industry is a big as the celebrity or financial sector).
Image Search
I find Microsoft image search pretty good, or at least as good as Yahoo. Google has a slight lead and tends to hit the spot more often, but Microsoft is pretty good in this department. Their image search interface is different from the original approach used by search engines, and is challenging to the novice user.
News Search and Video Search
Their news search is okay for mainstream searches, but fails when it comes to local articles. I did not find any information on how to be included in their news search engine. For now it seems that they rely largely on mainstream media, since I couldn’t find any small publishers. My guess is that they made a list of mainstream media sources, set crawl priorities, and left it at that.
Next: Optimizing for Microsoft Live Search >>
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