Microsoft`s Push for the AdWords Market - Everything is new, but is it enough?
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MSN Search rolled out a new user interface in February, a Search and Win promotion in March, which offers prizes to those who use the MSN search engine, and plans to revamp its entire search presence on the web within the next few weeks. Some critics of the MSN pilot program feel that Microsoft is a day late and a dollar short; Microsoft disagrees and simply states that it was waiting patiently to see where modern search would lead before jumping in with both feet. Joanne Bradford, top salesperson at Microsoft says, “I thank Yahoo and Google for proving that a software company can be a media company and a media company can be a software company.”
MSN certainly has their work cut out for them, however. In 2005, Google took in almost $6 billion in revenues from their Internet advertising, four times that of MSN. Yahoo collected $4.6 billion, more than three times that of Microsoft at $1.4 billion. Analysts say that they can easily expect MSN’s revenue to double within three to five years; however, experts also say that MSN’s revenue cannot keep climbing unless they close the gap in the irrelevant and what many consider “spammy” results from the search engine. And no gimmick in the world will make people overlook the poor search engine results, no matter how much they are offered.
Even with a successful launch of MSN’s adCenter, advertisers will only reach a fraction of surfers compared to Google’s and Yahoo’s. According to the Nielsen Net Ratings, Google finished 2005 with a whopping 48% of all searchers using it as their search engine, with Yahoo coming in second at 22%, which is a considerable decrease since August, 2005. MSN barely came in third place with only 11% of the searchers to boast about. Clearly, MSN search has been on the steady decline, and some analysts feel that they were asleep at the wheel for perhaps too long.
MSN recently dumped the Inktomi search engine in favor of its own algorithmic search engine, RankNet. RankNet is a “learning” engine, collecting information as searchers use the MSN search to better its results every time a search is made, then contouring future results based on the data. However, many people still seem unhappy with the search results provided by MSN search, indicating a lack of ability to weed out spam and duplicate content, while providing less relevant results than before.
Still, MSN’s marketing techniques are impressive, and Forrester Research projections place MSN’s Internet advertising revenues at $26 billion by the year 2009. Other experts strongly disagree, especially in light of the current failures by the search engine to provide relevant results. Microsoft has not unveiled its specific plans to revamp the search engine, whether they are algorithmic, filters, or other changes; they have only indicated that a major change is in the works.
Next: The returns of adCenter >>
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