Archive for the 'MSN' Category
Have you mentioned Yahoo showing related searches for image search? Showing the queries being search by others who was looking for the same thing as you do is a good idea. For example it seems rather logical that those who make an image search for MSN are shown Yahoo, Google and HotMail as related queries. Though, images that are attached to the links look irrelevant and made me smile:)
Recently published interview with Justin Osmer - Senior Product Manager at Microsoft – touched upon Live QnA product. Introduced last September, this service “is a very good place to go for opinion based sorts of things”. When it goes about some rather complex queries that plain automated search engine is not able to give an accurate answer for there is a good option to ask the question you’re interested in at Live QnA.
Check this out.
Looks like the MSN Adcenter had a bit of a hiccup this morning, and they have decided to pull it offline for the remainder of the business day. This was a unplanned outage and is not a good sign, especially for the efficacy of new technology platforms.
In the PPC world having your top 3 keyword bid management systems come down is wuite possible the worst thing that can happen - just ask Yahoo! why they decided to put the ole aginag Overture DTC finally to rest.
With Google breaking away from the pack does Microsoft have any chance to compete? Well if Microsoft acquires Yahoo they do. Here are ten reasons why they will acquire Yahoo in 2007.
Here are ShoeMoney’s Top 10 reasons why:
1. The search algorithm… duh… Microsoft’s horrid search algo is by far the single biggest problem that Microsoft has right now. The problem is that when there is no users using the search engine then there is a ton of ads that never are shown. If Microsoft were to acquire Yahoos search algorithm this would be a GIANT step in getting users back.
2. Overture Yahoo Search Marketing. Microsoft used to broker every through the company formally known as overture. for showing ads on msn.com search. They are now trying there own company but its chugging along at a very slow pace. Most advertisers like Microsofts Adcenter but agree there is just not enough volume from its search engine (see #1).
3. Yahoo Publisher Network - YPN IMO is the best contextual advertising network there is. They have a great quality control team and also a REAL PHONE NUMBER THAT REAL PEOPLE ANSWER if you have contextual questions. Nobody provides the level of customer support in regards to contextual advertising that Yahoo Publisher Network does.
4. Flikr - Again Microsoft may have a similar product but the volume is here. Boom another zillion people to market to.
5. del.icio.us - While Google is signing up or buying all the 2.0 advertising space Microsoft can acquire a huge name right here.
6. The People - Microsoft has tons of stale old people who do not understand this new industry. They are starting to just now contribute to rival open source projects like Zend and Mysql. Acquiring Yahoo people like Jeremy Zawodny (who wrote a book on Mysql and also contributed tools to the project). Microsoft realizes that they are not only loosing ground in the search industry fast but they also lost market share in server technology to zend (PHP) and other opensource products. If they want to keep there market share with Windows Server I think bringing in a lot of these brilliant Yahoo developers would keep them on the right track in making sure they integrate well with the open source items.
7. Video - Between Yahoo Video and Microsoft’s Soapbox They might be able to combine for a decent share of the video market. Why is the video market important - 2 words - video advertising. I took part in the beta test when Google did a trial run of video ads and then 2 months later they buy out utube… ya… video advertising. Ad Volume ++
8. Community properties - Yahoo has yahoo groups which numbers rival close to Myspace. Never heard of groups.yahoo.com ? Ohh yea you forgot about that huh? Instantly you have millions of people to show more ads to! Ad Volume++
9. Business Directory - Microsoft Just gave up there Business Directory efforts. Yahoo has always rocked it with there paid inclusion directory. Its by far the most respected business directory on the internet. Even at 300$ per year fee webmasters line up all day to submit there websites. Mean while Google’s Business directory is a laughing stock being powered by the corrupt DMOZ.
10. Yahoo Just cleaned house. It seems to me this makes a merger that much easier with less chiefs to merge.
Our money is on Q2 2007 for the hostile takeover to occurr, maybe Q3 depending on the growth curve of Vista and Adcenter advertiser scalability needs.
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The Microsoft adCenter team has announced a new feature available within the adCenter – “Divide Across The Month”. Enabling Microsoft advertisers to better predict the number of impressions available monthly and measure an “Average Participation Rate” which displays in percentage from 10% to 100% scale how your ad delivery will be allocated-flighted throughout the month.
The addition gives the advertiser an opportunity to better meet the targeted budget and flight thier ads throughout the month (though maybe in less quantities daily).
You could learn more about the new features in the adCenter help section.
Looks like Live.com (New MSN Search) is banning sites that use ’spammy’ technologies, like participating in link-exchange programs or using the services of link farms. An email from The Live Search Team was published in a Search Engine Watch forum that confirms the accusation:
Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you’ve removed these links and we will reevaluate.
Live Search
I’m not sure if those ultra strict measures are fair, and in respect to sites honestly exchanging links I feel a just penalty shuold be a ranking decrease. Penalizing the site for the behavior is enough to punish them - banning them is another issue. However, considering that spammy techniques used in link farming dramatically affect the search results as a whole; some still feel Live.com’s measures could be fair.
An easy and fast way of submitting websites to search engines was announced yesterday on PubCon conference. From now 3 major search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN support Sitemaps 0.90 format. They expect it would result in search results quality and freshness improvement and better representation of sites in search indices.
Sitemap protocols make it convenient to submit and update all site URLs, notify search engines of changes or new pages. The sitemap can be submitted to any site that has adopted the protocol and though for now it’s Google, Yahoo and MSN, other search engines are also invited to use this system.
All and detailed information about Sitemaps could be found on a new Sitemaps.org site. But in general I should say that if you already have a Google sitemap you shouldn’t change anything as it is supported by Yahoo and MSN from now. The format was not changed just now the sitemap submission option is available in Yahoo and MSN also.
