9xb - Creating Online Success

MICROSOFT: STILL PLAYING CATCHUP

Ah, Microsoft. Kicking them is a game that anyone can play. After all - they invented that ludicrous talking paperclip! Sometimes they're handy as a great excuse - "That report would have been with you on Friday, but Word crashed on me and I lost all my work". Ahem. Despite that, they've got more money and brain power than the rest of us - so watch out! And despite that, they're still getting it wrong online.

MSN search - soon to be officially relaunched as live.co.uk - is their Google rival. Like Google, they're trying to make money from it by selling ads alongside the normal results.

Unfortunately, their search results are often so bad that savvy users simply go elsewhere...

Obvious ways to spam...

A search for "web design yorkshire" - the top term for our company, 9xb - has an interesting top result in MSN: www.webdesignyorkshire.com.

The reason this is interesting is because the page this goes to has no content at all, doesn't mention Yorkshire or web design, and appears to be a dummy holding page for a design company. It seems that Microsoft will give you the highest rank if your domain name matches the search query. If that doesn't sound easy to spam, nothing does (hint hint!)

Weird figures

This website has been up and running for only a couple of months now. I know for a fact, that there are less than 50 pages on this site (at the time of writing, fact fans!). Google lists 37, Yahoo 27. MSN some how finds 200!

Weirder still, when you click to page 8 of the results, it changes its mind and decides that actually it can only find 48 pages. That doesn't inspire confidence.

Inaccuracy

All search engines have trouble deciding what to do with those little words, such as "it", "to" and "and" that actually make up a large part of the meaning of search terms. Searching on MSN for "cheap flights to leeds", brings up masses of results for "cheap flights from leeds." Google makes rather a better fist of it - although far from perfect.

Today's moral?

Microsoft has plenty of brains. Despite that, its current search offering is still a bit stupid. But - be aware that Microsoft has a long history of being the worst on the market and still finding a way to win...