MSN unveil their new 'Live' Search
Date Published 15/09/2006 - Click here for more recent news
As of yesterday (Thursday) MSN were forecasting that 100% of MSN.com searchers would be presented to their new Live Search! That's following on from Monday's posting in their blog when they announced, " now, we feel it’s time to unveil the new Live Search … no longer in beta, and powering searches on both Live.com and MSN."
So what can we already deduce about Live.com from the early scuttlebutt around the watercoolers? Here's a few snippetts that we picked-up on:
- Firstly, MSN not only changed the name to Live.com but their new look, most everybody is agreed, is a dead-ringer for G****e (you know who we mean) but then again so was Yahoo! when they made their changes.
- They've got an interesting new feature called Related Searches that appears on the right hand side of the screen above the Sponsored Sites area. For example if we search with northampton web design it offers as Related searches: Web Site Design Northampton; not quite enough to make the earth move - but different nevertheless.
- Many comment on the fact that Live.com doesn't index enough pages! In support of that point we checked out EASIserv.com in 'the big 3' for northampton web design - the result of that exercise (see table below) certainly showed Live.com to be well down on the other two, results-wise. But whether that's because they haven't got enough of them (results that is) - or just choose not to show 'em? Make your own mind up.
|
Position of EASIserv.com for keyword / phrase | ||
|
Search Engine |
Position |
Number of results |
|
Live.com (MSN) |
No.6 |
of about 218,926 results |
|
Google |
No.1 |
of about 2,520,000 results |
|
Yahoo! |
No.1 |
of about 2,690,000 results |
- There's an interesting 'kerfuffle' about Live.com / MSN (apparently) no longer sending forward referrer info (you know, the actual words that the searcher has typed in to the search engine). Many (including us at EASIserv.com) are addicted to and obsess about seeing what keywords people are searching with to get delivered to our websites. We've checked our weblog package and referrers' search details are definitely not appearing. Now, there are 2 prevailing schools of thought over this 'small' matter; theory No. 1) is that MSN have dropped the ball and theory No. 2) is that maybe most stats packages have not yet been switched over from MSN to recognise Live.com? We vote for theory No. 1) !
Either way, we'll maintain a close watching brief and see how that one turns out. Will we learn to love Live.com? We'll get back to you on that one too!
Update 1: 6:26 pm on Sept 15, 2006 - MSNDude (who fronts-up in forums in a semi-official capacity on behalf of MSN) posts in WebMasterWorld on the matter of "the referrers' search details not being passed" imbroglio thus, "This is NOT by design. We're looking into it. Thanks for telling us." So there you have it - theory No. 1) it is.
Update 2: 4:46 am on Sept 21, 2006 - MSNDude returns (with news of 'the fix going in' ) "The fix went out a few hours ago, and it's nice to see that it appears to work. We do know this information is important to webmasters, and we regret the inconvenience."
We can confirm that 'the fix' does indeed appear to work - and here's an extract below from one of our weblogs showing evidence of referrer info from search.live.com. Confusingly, however, we also see referrer info from search.msn.com in the logs - we had presumed that particular nomenclature would disappear completely with this change?
And so closes another episode in the constant SE vigil on behalf of EASIserv.com's customers - it's brickbats for the MSN/Live.com team for dropping the ball in the first place (wonder who signed-off on that particular work-package?) - but also a couple of bouquets too, for not only restoring the feature reasonably quickly, publicly confirming that they had fixed it and regretting the inconvenience, but also for being open(ish) about their failure too.
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