I had made mention today in my Thursday Beer Break , that MSN/Live had some quality growth over the least year according to the recent search market share figures released by Nielsen NetRatings.....

I was looking at some analytics for a client's site and noticed MSN/Live was performing quite well for him. His rankings on ML and YaH are relative ( working the G) so that isn't really the case..... Obviously from market to market this can vary, but in this one ( hot tubs and spaas) there is something worth looking at.

As many of ya know I went from the Big 3 down to the Big 2 lately cursing MSN all the way..... I am certainly re-addressing that and just may have to start showing MSN/Live some more love than I have been for the last year or so.....

.. could be something here after-all

A large ISP in Australia stopped using it as their featured search engine 'due to poor quality results' - an interesting move...

I'm a believer of 'varies from market to market' - I've just yet to find a market for which msn/live performs

Now, I may be wrong, but in the back of my memory somewhere I've got the feeling mobtex said that msn delivered large amounts of quality traffic to him.....

I wouldn't count them out, just because of the wallet that's backing the whole operation. It's not like yahoo, where the company MUST perform to stay above water.

Thus, I see them being a serious competitor in the future..... probably many years.

Though MSN/Live drives considerably less referrals than yahoo, conversions are almost parallel to yahoo. But G still completely blows them away. WS ranks are pretty much the same across all 3, but in regards to referrals; it does appear that MSN/Live is gaining some momentum.

My main complaint at the moment is that MSN gave approval for Beta testing with the Live stats package, but has not communicated with us since then.

No. Tim

I have been getting lots of traffic from msn live for about a week.  I have had a couple of sales from them, plus my traffict has doubled.  Pretty cool.  I got an email from them, but is was mostly "we are in beta and we will get back to you" stuff.  I don't know what they are doing, but I like it!

looks like they are finally getting things right. well, from my perspective anyway. i've seen ranking for one site go from 226 to 4 (which is much more in line with the other big uns). obviously, there has been a major overhaul on Live. bout time. tim

Couldn't agree with you more. I've found that working on sites in South Africa especially over the last 4 months my MSN traffic is the second biggest driver of traffic to my sites next to G.

Most of the traffic I get is organic so yeah, I'd say big up to them. Another interesting thing, my conversions from MSN are almost as good as my conversions on G (not for all products) but a certain product.

I have used msn live for a long time then I switched to google, but now I found that having a few different ones is better then just sticking to one.  I have found things with msn that google didn't show and I have found things with yahoo that neither of the other two showed.  They all need to stay alive.

MSN seems to have de-indexed alot of blogs and websites with link exchanges.

As a mere mortal, I go to Google most of the times for searches, and Ask.com occasionally (when I actually have a question to ask.) I could care less about Microsoft.

From a business POV, in May1998, hubby took a 13 month course on Novell Networking, which held 75% of the networking market, while Microsoft came in third in that area, having just decided to join in. At the time, networking techs were making $75,000-$200,000, depending on how far they'd want to take it. (40 hour work weeks was the lower end, and 80+ was the high end.

He graduated second to the top of his class 13 months later. One "little" problem, though - two months before graduating, Novell came out with a new version, so he had to relearn everything in 2 months, which wasn't really possible. Worse yet, Microsoft had 75% of the market by then. Of course, since that Y2K bug needed fixing by the end of the same year, causing the market to divert over to folks, who could fix it at temporary jobs.

Also, Bill Gates talked the American government into accepting 200,000 technicians from around the globe to become legal aliens in the US to "fix the Y2K bug." Then 90% of the dotcommers folding, within another year, very few even remembered Novell existed, and the average techy's income was cut in half or more. and 4 year degrees became a prerequisite for most of the jobs. (No doubt some of the result was the glutton of techies suddenly available in the US, but, no matter what you think of Gate's personally, from a business perspective, Microsoft takes the word "shrewed" to new heights.)

Lesson Learned (and, yes, I know about the judgment in Europe to Microsoft): Never under estimate the ultimate outcome of Microsoft, once they decide to get serious about one of their services.

I'm not sure how serious Microsft is about "SEing" yet, but I am beginning to see flaws in Google -- a tendency to assume their customers want more from their service then we do. (I'm not big on being spied on, even if it's supposedly to make my online research and buying "easier.") I am sure when Microsft becomes serious with their search engine, they will come out on top in any continent that doesn't tie their hands. They are also ballsy enough to just pull out of Europe entirely, instead of accepting that judgment. (Not saying they will, but they could with no dire consequence.)

I'm not sure the question for this thread is on target. To me the questions might be, "How serious is Microsoft about going "Live?" and..."If they are serious, is their hope for the other Search Engines?" If I were in the SEO business, I'd keep an eye out for that giant. When it decides to move, the earth shakes!