MSN Live Search Is Making Itself Competitive

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 17 of November , 2007 at 1:42 am

MSN Live Search is making improvements again. I’d like to say that this latest improvement is way overdue and I’m quite glad to see it happening:

(Source) This week we’re excited to announce that the Live Search Webmaster Center has moved out of its closed beta and we are now open for a public beta. In conjunction with this release we want to announce the creation of the Live Search Webmaster Center blog.

It’s always good whenever a product that has been in beta moves out of beta and into the public realm. That means that enough early users have been happy with it to give it praise and that the developers are comfortable enough with the product to introduce it on mass scale. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect. It just means that it’s good enough - or that enough people thought it was good enough to share with the rest of us.

The fact that MSN Live Search is implementing a Webmaster Center means that MSN is serious about competing against Google and Yahoo! for search traffic. They may be in third place, but at least they’re trying. Maybe MSN is just tired of getting beat up, or maybe they’ve realized that if they don’t do something soon to improve their search technology that they will become irrelevant. Ask has gained on them and both Google and Yahoo! have stretched their leads. It’s time for MSN to make a comeback. The Webmaster Center might help them do that. Here are some of the features I’ve seen after an initial excursion:

• Live Search Books
• Business Listings
• URL Submission
• Product Information
• Videos
• Custom Search Engine
• Virtual Earth Map
• Webmaster Forum
• Webmaster Blog
• And Technical Assistance for Webmasters

Now all they need to do is convince people to use them.

Category: Search Engines

• Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg

No comments yet.