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As a company, Microsoft is decades-old. But its Windows Live Search search engine is the youngest of any of the majors. Generally speaking, Microsoft comes behind Google and Yahoo in terms of usage. But number three still makes it a very important search engine. For more background, see Microsoft news stories from our sister site, Search Engine Land. Below are topics submitted by Sphinn members:
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Microsoft is aiming to buy Yahoo. Seriously. read more »
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Microsoft, which runs Live Search and is the parent company of aQuantive, which owns Avenue A Razorfish, is now partnering with another search marketing firm, The Search Agency, to offer SEO and Paid Search Marketing services to small businesses. I read more »
8 Comments     
Karen Blakeman lets everyone know that the link: and linkdomain: commands work again on MSN / Live, all you have to do is prefix the command with a + sign to get it to work. read more »
9 Comments     
Has the tide shifted? Is Yahoo creeping into position 3, while Microsoft's adCenter is climbing to position two in the search ad space? Some advertisers say yes. read more »
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A pretty amazing write up by Danny Sullivan covering what he believes is wrong with Microsoft Search and opportunities available to them. read more »
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(Danny Sullivan post) If Microsoft's Yahoo walkaway is a ploy to save $5 billion, CEO Steve Ballmer may have proven himself pennywise & pound foolish. He was prepared to spend billions to make Microsoft a serious Google rival but may have destroyed read more »
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Live Search and AdCenter have reached a truly depressing state. With this in mind, I am pleading with them. Please, get better. There are basic and obvious problems. None of them too hard to fix. This is just getting depressing. read more »
5 Comments     
Months ago, MSN changed bots to detect cloaking. Result?
"Every single domain I had is still in Yahoo or MSN. That is not a good sign for them. Some of these are way older than a cloaked domain should be." - XMCP read more »
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Jane Copland writes... This morning, I was talking to Rob Kerry about some particularly competitive search phrases and looking around in the SERPs. We'd gone through most of the usual suspects when [cheap flights] came up. Google duly returned its t read more »
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What will the search interfaces of tomorrow look like? How might we be presented with information that we are interested in differently than we are today, and how might that information be delivered to us in manners that we find helpful? read more »
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From Barry: "It is currently in a private beta, so I am not even sure if I can blog this, but I read all the privacy pages, and most are returning not found errors, so I am going to post these screen captures for you." read more »
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Gab has a really interesting post about 5 things that MSN must do to gain marketshare on Google. I'm sure there are many others who feel the same ... Google is gradually going to take control of the net, and MSN is the best chance for keeping them h read more »
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Comparing Microsoft's Web Analytics service "Gatineau" against Google Analytics. Who will come out on top??? read more »
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Live Search is offering a new way for AdWords customers to get click-throughs — their own natural SERPs. They appear to be indexing AdWords ads from Google's own SERPs. Doing a search on Live for colorations paint (at the time of this writing) will read more »
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Certainly news to me. Implications are pretty big because though MSN will likely find, spider & index the new site, the new site won't get any credit for the work done on the old site.

Scott Hendison asks why this is...I confess that I can't thi read more »
10 Comments     
So Microsoft adCenter is the only one of the 3 major paid search platforms that does NOT report on revenue read more »
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Microsoft Live Search upgrades their crawler today. From now on msnbot/1.1 supports conditional GET requests and HTTP compression. That's a very much appreciated move. I've chatted with Nathan Buggia from Live Search who was kind enough to provide m read more »
3 Comments     
Rumors are out that Microsoft will launch a porn affiliate programm soon. The top secret code name for this project is "pornbucks", but analysts say that it will be launched as "M$ SMUT CASH" next year or so. Live Search promotes it since August 200 read more »
2 Comments     
Microsoft has announced the introduction of mobile display and text advertising on MSN Mobile in the U.S., starting today. Microsoft has previously offered mobile display advertising in Belgium, France, Japan, Spain and the U.K, but not in the U.S. read more »
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Live Search will not dump their clueless and ineffective search quality project. They're proud to be the one and only bigger search engine that spams.

Even when they apologize to the Webmaster community, they're not able to tell the truth. They read more »
6 Comments     
Imagine a search engine changing around the results that you see, not based upon the time that a page is published, but rather on some estimate of the importance of a page to you, and how that importance might vary with time and your personal calend read more »
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Ok, here's even more evidence of MS spamming us. What will it take to make it stop??? read more »
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I've been getting a hard time for never submitting anything to Sphinn, so here goes :)

My opinion is that the answers Eytan doesn't give here are nearly as interesting as the ones he does provide (which are fairly in depth). I particularly like: read more »
1 Comment     
Scott Hendison laments the fact that he can't get a 3 year old site in MSN despite performing all the requisite actions including creating a proper XML sitemap and using the Microsoft Webmaster Tools. read more »
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SEL - It's not entirely clear if this marks the end of the whole episode but it certainly appears to (at least on the surface.) A skeptic might see this as a power play to deflate Yahoo's stock and then come back with a tender offer or another try t read more »
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