Dig into any self-labeled “SEO forum” and you’ll probably find some neatly organized categories along the lines of “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “MSN”. Checking the amount of activity in each will reveal the inclusion of Yahoo, and especially MSN, seems to be a mere “courtesy” on the part of the forum founders. Microsoft has been trying to change this for some time now, and the newly branded “Windows Live” is their latest attempt to do so. Will all those vacant MSN forums be lively any time soon? The short answer is “no,” read on to find out why.

Live.com is many things, including a search engine, customizable web portal, and the latest attempt by Microsoft to dig into Google’s market share in search. Its opening page is a simple one, in keeping with the “expectations” built by Google, providing several options and an invitation for you to personalize it as your own web portal.

Most of the features on the site are functional; while a few remain in the development stage and some are in between. Only Passport members can fully customize the basic Live page with RSS feeds and “gadgets”, much like Google’s portal page with Google Accounts. The basic, un-customized page offers a search bar with the options of Web, Images, News, Local and QnA.

The Web search performs much as other search engines, only it serves ads from MSN’s new ad network instead of Adwords. It does offer a “related search” section, something Google has yet to implement, but a standard feature of Ask.com for a while now.

The relevancy of the results, is, as always, a matter of debate. MSN’s Search performs ably in many regards, but one can’t help but wonder if the larger index Google provides means you’re missing something. Relevancy is undeniably important, though. It is one of the core reasons a searcher might actually make a switch, should his current engine of choice “let him down” too many times.

The Images search is an improvement on the Google and Yahoo technology, in that it offers dynamic thumbnail display in a “pageless” layout. Pass your cursor over a thumbnail and it will enlarge, with a brief description and the URL where the image can be found. The interface is intuitive and really feels innovative. The thumbnails can be dynamically resized, and the “scratchpad” can quickly create collections by drag-and-drop. The primary drawback to this very innovative feature is that it will respond slowly for those on dial-up and with weaker machines.

The News Search is a direct search function that lacks the “top stories” aggregator of Google News. Type in a word and you will get back a search list that is drawn from mainstream news outlets, which have stories that use your search term in the first sentence or two. The Local button will give you an interactive map of the area where hits for your search term are found. There’s little innovative here, but the presentation of the map is nice. It offers similar variations on the “route, aerial, and hybrid” graphical display popularized by Google Maps.

Windows Live Q&A allows you to post a question to the Windows Q&A universe and see who has an answer. This system is still in beta, so the technical specifics may change. Users post a question that is then open for 4 days to responses. At the end of the 4 day period, voting commences on the answers provided. This feature currently has no Google analog, though Yahoo has a similar service.

Additional Features- Betas
A variety of betas for Live services are available through ideas.live.com, the MS equivalent of Google Labs.

The Windows Live Mail is an in-house mail service that provides you with two gigabytes of storage and an updated version of what appears to be Outlook Express. It has some desktop features and keyboard hotkeys, new methods of sorting and categorizing, but nothing terribly radical. Windows Live Mail Desktop is a program that allows you to manage multiple e-mail accounts, including AOL, Gmail and others. It also manages newsgroups and RSS feeds.

Microsoft Live Office will be a web hosting service designed to provide you with a basic business website and domain name. Google Page Creator has tread this territory before, but was aimed at personal use, whereas Microsoft, with the “Office” brand, seems to be targeting businesses.

Windows Live Shopping and Windows Live Product Search are both as advertised: attempts to provide web-wide searches for products and shopping opportunities. The product search gives a dynamic display that can range from a simple text list to a thumbnail layout that borrows from the innovative image search layout. Searches can be refined by seller, brand, and most interestingly, “related term”, which provides a “tag cloud” of the kind popular with social bookmarking sites today.

Windows Live Academic, mentioned above, will provide search opportunities in “thousands of academic and research journals.” If their database has some heft to it, this will be a great addition to the search process. It remains to be seen if this academic resource will rival Google Scholar. Like Google Scholar, the results can be frustrating as many provide links only to abstracts or excerpts. Access to the full text of such results requires purchase or subscription to the journal in which they were originally published.

Conclusions
Live.com’s primary innovative feature is the image search, and even that has issues with slower connections. So far, virtually everything else served up by Microsoft has been done by Google, or other search engines, before. Even if Microsoft was able to “do it better”, it will have a hard time convincing existing users to switch from Google, as there is little incentive to do so unless these services are done so much better. That is not currently the case. Microsoft merely offers an “alternative” with Windows Live, not an indispensable alternative.

By Eric Lester

It seems I now do this rant every single year when traffic statistics are discussed in web industry news. Last week I posted to my Reality SEO blog that referred traffic numbers are the only statistic that webmasters should be concerned about when looking at their search engine rank. I wrote about this last year after ComScore Media Metrics statistics were released discussing Search Engine Queries generated by each search property.Well now that MSN search has made its official debut, we can see that they put three “Sponsored Sites” links both above and below their organic search results, along with those Overture (Soon to be Yahoo Branded) PPC ads along the right side of the page. Not bad visually, but it appears to be keeping visitors on the MSN search site because they simply are NOT clicking through to highly ranked sites according to closely watched traffic statistics of several sites I monitor for clients.

I’ve been pouring over web stats for a half dozen clients looking for traffic from MSN and it is missing in action. Even though these sites rank well for targeted terms for my clients - MSN is not delivering the traffic at all.This has always been an issue for SEO’s and their clients and we are puzzling this one over, looking for results from those top rankings at both Yahoo and MSN as they seem to retain the searchers no matter how well we rank the sites!

Yahoo has dropped dramatically, with referred traffic that used to amount to over 5% of the visitors to client sites; it has dropped as low as 1.5% of total referred traffic from search engines. After a recent increase in referred traffic from Yahoo search, we were hopeful it would stay high, but it wasn’t to be. Rankings have not declined - Read That Again - Rankings have not declined, just the referred traffic!Google has gone up in referrals from foreign countries, including foreign language sites. We used to see tiny amounts of traffic trickle in from non-English language countries, but Google country sites for Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Mexico and a dozen other language specific Googles have combined to send more non-English referred traffic than the total coming from (English) Yahoo Search!

The search world is getting very odd when great rankings at Yahoo and MSN don’t equal referred traffic. This has always been the case to a degree, but is getting extreme and very disturbing. Google has always sent more traffic, with as much as 85% of referred search traffic coming from English Speaking Google variants in US, Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia, and UK sending more traffic than both the US Yahoo and MSN.What is the value of top rankings in MSN and Yahoo if those top positions don’t bring traffic?

Zippo, none are coming from MSN Search even though we are better ranked in several important search phrases for client sites at MSN than at Google! This is serious and it’s a problem that we must resolve. “Searches performed” statistics, like those exhaustively researched by Bill Platt in a recent article are absolutely meaningless if searchers don’t click-through to top ranking sites! What does this mean?Even though I write a similar article each year, discuss this topic on large discussion lists and mention it regularly in my Reality SEO blog, I have yet to get honest answers from search engine representatives at Yahoo or MSN. I did get a couple of Yahoo Search managers to admit that more visitors stay on the Yahoo site and continue to either PPC ads or to other Yahoo links because “There is more of value to the searcher at Yahoo.” What is of more value to a searcher than relevant search results?

I gave those Yahoos�s access to my traffic statistics and those of clients so they could see that nearly 70% of my traffic and that of clients was coming from Google - Even When Those Same Sites Ranked Highly in Searches at Yahoo! No comment and no explanations as to why, when they generate huge numbers of search queries, that far fewer visitors click-through from Yahoo search results than do from Google search results.One must assume that someone searching for something visits at least a few of the sites that appear in the list of search results, no? They sure do visit from Google in significant numbers - consistently. But both Yahoo and MSN Search are failing to send referred search traffic to sites ranked highly in their search results. Why?

I highly recommend that all webmasters with access to statistics for their own site look seriously at your traffic referred by Yahoo & MSN for search phrases you rank well on. Do YOU have traffic referred by Yahoo or MSN Search for your high ranking search phrases? Why not?

By Mike Banks Valentine
Mike Banks Valentine operates WebSite101.com and performs ethical search engine optimization and press release optimization & distribution online. If you’ve got news you can rank at the top for your search phrases.

I don’t fully understand the algorithms involved with the new Beta search from MSN but I have to say as a site owner I love it.

After releasing my new site to the World Wide Web I am already really impressed with the speed that I got indexed and even more impressed with the ranking I have been given.

I let my newest site (www.buy-dvds-online.com) out of its box Less than 2 weeks ago and I have already attained a position of 3 out of 1,589,310 for the keyword search “buy dvd’s online”. You can see the results here

How is this happening?
Well I have looked at all sorts of forums relating to MSN Beta and it seems that it genuinely searches for the most keyword relevant site it can find.

The name of the site in relation to the keyword or words searched for has proved as important as ever, when I searched for the keywords “free traffic tips” on msn I got www.freetraffictip.com as number 1 result. When I searched for the same keywords on Google the same site came in at number 41.

Further searching for some more obscure phrases seem to show that MSN beta places a high priority on the keyword density and relevancy, this will reward all of us who have keywords relevant to our sites and do not rely on heavy back-links (although I believe this is vital to get a decent rank with other engines).

The fact that I am ranked at all means that I have escaped the Google “sandbox”, I don’t expect to receive a PR for at least 2 months and a decent listing for the same period from Google.

Let’s hope that MSN Beta search is used quickly as a replacement for MSN search, My opinion is that we should all be allowed to get a placement we deserve rather than one we have effectively bought or traded, it kind of gives us little guys a chance. I still love Google, it provides us with a challenge and is still the number one search engine but I still want the traffic I get from the smaller engines.

By Mark White