It is days like this I dread as a reporter. Today is April Fools Day, and you need to be on the lookout for what is real news and what is fake news. Below, a roundup of some of the April Fools hoaxes from the search industry, starting with Google. With Google, it all starts […]
The LiveSide blog posted a screen shot of one example of how the Kumo, Microsoft’s possible new brand for Live Search, home page might look like. Here is that picture: Very similar to how Live.com works, but it simply reads “Kumo” instead. In other home page news, Yahoo has been testing a new home page […]
Microsoft’s Live Search still isn’t built into Firefox, but you can add it to your Firefox search box manually. Now, a new add-on from Live Search does this complete with the ability for the search box to auto-suggest terms you might be searching for. For more, see the Live Search blog.
Microsoft’s SearchPerks program is running a three-day incentive to encourage participants to do more searches on Live Search. Starting today, and running through January 23, SearchPerks is offering double tickets for every search with a max of 50 tickets available to be earned each day. SearchPerks is notifying members with an email that looks like […]
Microsoft Bid to Beat Google Builds on a History of Misses from the Wall Street Journal has a very detailed look at some of the mistakes Microsoft made early on in the paid search space. The piece goes through the failure of Microsoft’s original keyword ad platform, named bCentral Keywords, which was discontinued in early […]
The Live Search Blog announced they are letting a new robot loose. The new search engine crawler is named msnbot/2.0b and will be added to the army of current MSN spiders, currently named msnbot/1.1. The new spider is currently being tested but will ultimately replace the old spider. The new spider will respect the current […]
Jeremiah Andrick from the Microsoft Live Search team has written a detailed blog post named Getting the right kind of links. In this blog post, Jeremiah explains the issues Microsoft sees with link exchanges and then gives tips on how to get “the right kind of links.” Those tips include to be the “subject matter […]
Live Search announced you can now use images to find similar images in Live Image Search. To use this feature, you go to Live Image Search, search for an image, hover over an image, and click on “show similar images.”
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Continuing on with its strategy to build search share by gaining distribution partners, Microsoft has landed a deal to have its MSN Toolbar offered to anyone in the United States who downloads Java for Internet Explorer.
Microsoft has added Virtual Earth “Birds Eye” panoramas to Live Search image search results. They appear to be live in the US only right now and around selected points of interest (images below) but they’re very striking. You can pan and zoom and switch from a Birds Eye view to aerial or map views and […]
The LiveSide blog reports on screen captures showing that Microsoft may be testing rebranding Live Search as Windows Live Search. Here is a snippet from one of the screen captures:
Live Search September 2008 Update Underway from the Search Engine Roundtable reports discussion at WebmasterWorld that Live Search is undergoing a major index and ranking update. The Live Search results seem to have changed, and webmasters and SEOs are taking notice. I personally noticed referral increases and drops from Live Search on some of the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Microsoft has announced a “back-to-school” promotion for using Live Search through the Live Search cashback portal. The promotion adds up to “double the cashback rewards on millions of products from hundreds of participating retailers.” Example promotions include 36-percent off select shoes at Foot Locker, 18-percent off on Lenovo ThinkPad, and 30 percent off on The […]
The Live Search Blog announced the new launch of Search and Give. When you search on Search and Give, Microsoft will donate a penny each time you use that page to search the Web. Microsoft will donate up to 500 searches per person per month. There are over 1 million organizations participating in the program […]
Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson is perhaps the main strategist in the company’s battle for online advertising dollars and in some sense driving the future of Microsoft as an entity. Fortune magazine interviews and profiles Johnson. Johnson runs the group that controls the Windows OS and online services, including Live Search.
Microsoft this week has done a number of things in the mobile space, in addition to its introduction of the Live Search Cashback program on the desktop (which presumably will extend to mobile search/shopping). Windows Live launched a new homepage for mobile and the company introduced graphical ads and paid search for mobile.
At one point or another, most of the big online media companies have talked about buying Facebook. Yahoo is rumored to have made an early offer of almost $1 billion for the company, which was (obviously) turned down. But as the MicroHoo discussions appeared to be deteriorating, Microsoft apparently made some formal inquiries about Facebook’s […]
After weeks of Microsoft testing a new home page design for Live.com, the new design seems to be live now. When I visit Live.com, I see:
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web
The Live Search Blog announced the much requested addition of RSS to Live Search News. A little over a week ago Microsoft launched Live Search News, and one of the biggest feature requests off the bat was an RSS option. 9 days later, Microsoft has added the RSS icon to all the pages, including the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
When I did my Ratings Service Faceoff: Search Share Compared, June 2007 To March 2008 post last week, I noted that Microsoft had an odd increase according to Compete for March 2008. The company now says this was due to Live Search Club traffic that it shouldn’t have counted. Microsoft’s US share for March 2008 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
At the CTIA wireless industry trade show yesterday, among the scores of announcements, Microsoft said that it would be releasing a new and improved mobile IE browser for smart phones in the fall that promises to bring “desktop quality” to the mobile Internet experience. (Numerous others are engaged in this same pursuit, including Safari, Mozilla, […]
Microsoft runs prize campaign for Live Search users from NewMediaAge reports that Microsoft is running another search and win promotion. This time the contest is based in the UK, in partnership with Virgin. It is named the Big Snap Search. Users can go to bigsnapsearch.com and search. At the top of the search results page, […]
Search spam, using techniques that manipulate the search results, feels like it is getting more dangerous every day. Some search spammers go as far as hacking sites to inject link spam into unsuspecting web pages. And some go even further by polluting the search results with nasty malware. Yesterday we covered a story about a […]
Karen Blakeman reported that you can now search use link command searches at Live Search again. Microsoft first pulled back the link command in March of this year, due to trouble with automated queries. But as Karen reported, it seems to be back with a new prefix. Just add a plus sign before the operators […]
Microsoft has announced the acquisition of a comparison shopping engine named Jellyfish.com. Microsoft believes that Jellyfish’s technology “has some interesting potential applications” that they can make a “key component” of Live Search.
The iWon site has been relaunched with a new look and with the intention to give away more prizes. Barry Diller’s IAC revamps iWon.com from BusinessWeek details most of the changes, which include more “games, more prizes and plans to add social networking functions.” In addition, iWon will contain a search toolbar that links search […]
Continuing on with this month’s search popularity stats review, I’m turning now to those from Nielsen NetRatings, after having looked at Hitwise stats yesterday. Like yesterday’s stats, those from NetRatings are from August 2007. They show Google on top, Yahoo fairly steady and Microsoft largely holding on to gains made in June.
Perfect 10 has issued a press release announcing it is now going after Microsoft for copyright infringement over including Perfect 10’s images in Live Image Search. Norm Zada, Perfect 10’s president said: Microsoft is showing tens of thousands of extremely valuable celebrity images, along with Perfect 10 images, without authorization, which it obtains from hundreds […]
At one point Microsoft appeared to be backing away from the MSN brand in favor of “Live.” That no longer seems to be the case. Today the company launched a new mobile portal, signaling what would appear to be a new commitment to the MSN brand, with Live as the subsidiary search brand. The look […]
Here’s the press release confirming the acquisition we reported on yesterday.
Microsoft’s top search executive leaving company from the Seattle PI covers Microsoft’s Christopher Payne reportedly leaving the company. The AP also reports similar news from its sources. Payne took over search efforts at Microsoft back in 2003. He oversaw what I’d call Microsoft’s "second era" of search, that of developing a crawler-based search engine to […]
The Live Search Blog announced that the Live Search SOAP API is now out of beta. In addition, they added some new features including more languages, increased search results, enhanced search tags, more local options, improved phone results and more coding samples.
Today I noticed Live.com trying to get me to search with it in Firefox. Then Yahoo did the same thing. So I guess a new round of “let’s change search defaults” is going on within Firefox. That seemed a good excuse for a revisit how the various search engines are trying to pull us as […]