Official word is finally starting to come out about MSN's new in-house search engine. Their goal is to provide results of such relevance that MSN will take over the top spot in the SEO world, and become the most popular search engine, outstripping its main rivals Google and Yahoo! The new engine is due to go public in July, at which time a few other changes in their search results will also be noticeable.
In addition to the new search results generated by their own engine, MSN will clearly separate paid listings from search listings, putting the paid (PPC) listings on top and to the right of the organic search results. This should please many in the SEO industry who feel that the way PPC listings are displayed can be misleading to consumers -- and plenty of consumers feel the same way! Of these paid listings, at least 2 will be advertisements that are sold directly by MSN. Whether or not they will continue to have any relationship with Overture (their current PPC provider) remains to be seen, although MSN says there are no plans to end it.
In the meantime, MSN continues their relationship with Overture to provide their sponsored listings, and uses both Overture Site Match and LookSmart listings for main search results.
Look for the LookSmart relationship to come to an end once again, this time for good, once MSN is satisfied with their own search engine and its results. I would also expect to see Overture become much less important in the overall scheme of things on MSN, until ultimately, they too will probably be phased out, provided all goes as hoped for by the MSN executives.
What impact this will have on SEO is of course up in the air, but it stands to reason that the MSN search bot will have much in common with the Google bot and other spiders which they feel yield the best results. Current SEO standards will probably apply, at least for the most part.
Since MSN ended the LookSmart relationship, I've found their results to be far less consistent than they were previously. They are drawing from a different database, plus they are rotating results, and now combining results from at least two databases routinely. This has probably cost them a few web surfers. I look forward to seeing what MSN will unveil in July, and I hope that it's a robust and reliable engine, with well-balanced results. Not only does that make it easier for me in an SEO capacity to help our clients, but it makes it nicer for me as a web surfer, to find relevant search results that are helpful rather than an annoying series of mediocre websites.
We almost fell for the insyncsoft scam. I had my wife call the Czech consulate in New York and they told me it was a fake address. How did this Tina lose $3000.
Posted by: bob | March 30, 2004 at 01:18 PM
The InsyncSoft scam is a variety of the relatively well-known Russian PayPal scam. A company says they operate out of Russia (or Ukraine, or some Eastern European country -- the exact country is not as important as making sure that many Americans would be ignorant of their monetary system). The country says that they can't use PayPal, and need an American to process their PayPal payments for them. Payments go through the victim's account, who in turn sends the money by wire to Russia (or wherever). In return, the American will receive 10% - 20% of the payments as commission.
The catch is, the American wires the money right away. The "payment" is promptly backcharged through PayPal, which then wants the money from the American. Depending on how much money they wire to Russia before the backcharging starts, they can lose a substantial amount of money.
Posted by: Laura Seeley | March 31, 2004 at 09:00 AM
The Web Guru states:
i164 will be launching next week being the first search engine to cater to SEO professionals.
The search engine will be directed to the business, educational, and government communities.
Home pages will not be allowed.
SEOs desiring a new way to drive traffic may want to forget MSN and see what i164 will do for them.
Posted by: The Web Guru | April 13, 2004 at 08:25 PM