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Is MSN Search Becoming a "Better Mousetrap"?
First let's start with why Google became "the search engine". In
the beginning of search engines there were a ton of players some
you may remember and some you may not. Some survived and others
died off and many of the small fish were eaten up (bought out)
by their brothers as the big three and came to control the vast
majority of the search market. Google came out of this with the
biggest chunk by far of that majority, it didn't hurt that for a
while they were actually providing the results of their
competitors (it was not that long ago that Yahoo was simply a
mirror of Google's results) but there was something more at the
core of their success.
Keep in mind that as this war was raging the internet was really
still quite young and there were a lot less sites online even
say 3 years ago then there are today. Take that back 7-8 years
when the net was really starting to grow and Google first
launched in 1998. At that time people where not yet doing a ton
of "buying" online they were more in the information gathering
world. You really have to think about what it was like just a
short time back. People were quickly moving to looking up any
question, concept or piece of information online and for a huge
number of people it was a brand new experience. Further when you
started trying to find sites about "monarch butterflies" or
"classic muscle cars" or "fine cigars" there were actually a lot
less sites out there then there are today about what ever
subject it may have been that you were looking to learn about
and people were hungry for new information.
During that time since buying was less of a factor people
honestly were looking to find sites built by John and Jane Doe
about what ever subject they most enjoyed. Chat was a relatively
new thing, blogs were unknown, forums and news groups were a new
concept for most surfers and most new web surfers thought AOL
was "the internet". Yes we have come a long way in 7 years to
say the least. Into this world came Google as just one of many
search engines but Google was different! How so seems to have
been forgotten by many. It was not the plain look of Google with
out weather stats and scrolling news that made it become the
huge player it is today it was functionality and its ability to
help users find sites they failed to find on the other search
engines greatly expanding the available information that users
were actively seeking.
Over time the word got out, people started to use phrases such
as "go google it" instead of "look it up online" and soon Google
clearly had the better mouse trap and the cliché became reality
as the world indeed beat a path strait to the Google door step.
During all this time people began to actually buy things online,
Google introduced contextual ads and an empire was born. All was
not well in the Google world though because internet marketers
started to effectively do something that we today call search
engine optimization and very soon after search engine
spamming became a reality and a real problem. Almost at once
Google started to move toward not just judging on page text and
factors but looking at links to one site from other sites.
Optimizers didn't give up though reciprocal links became all the
rage of course people still continued to tweak content and the
"Google Dance" became a fact of internet life and a selling
point for those offering search
engine marketing services. Optimizers would take an action,
Google would react and that brought us clear through to today.
Over time the value of links has grown enormously all while the
value of the actual content on web pages has decreased a great
deal. So, what do we have today? A Google that I personaly
consider broken, a Google that so values links and the anchor
text in them that is now lists many pages for terms that are not
contained anywhere on the site at all. Clearly when this is the
case the user experience must suffer.
Yet this is only part of the problem for the Google user today.
There is one more factor that made Google so successful in the
beginning and that seems to have been lost on just about
everyone including most "SEO Experts". This little factor is the
speed of indexing and listing of new sites. Google seems to be
addressing this with their SiteMaps program but that applies to
fairly technical site owners who know how to create an XML map
and register it with Google. I guess in time most templates and
WYSIWYG editors will start to create them automatically but
there are millions of sites with out XML on them and there
probably will always be millions of them. In the beginning
Google had the hungriest spider on the web indexing new content
so quickly that once you had your main site indexed any updating
at all would get you spidered every few days to two weeks
maximum even if you were a new site that today would be labeled
a "PR0" and "in the Google sand box".
Today anyone monitoring the big three search engines can tell
you MSN is currently in the old Google pattern of indexing new
sites with record speed and revisiting existing sites so fast it
is almost scary. MSN seems to be finding pages almost as fast as
we can upload them; recently I honestly had 15 new pages of
content indexed one day after uploading on a brand new site with
no XML feeds of any kind and this site had only been online for
two weeks total. In short if you put a new site online and
compare the reactions of the big three in most cases you will
have the following results. Google will index it the slowest
(unless you get a link on say a PR7 site), Yahoo will get to it
a little faster but stall in indexing all the pages (perhaps to
push paid inclusion?) but put out a few decent links and MSN
will have the whole thing indexed in a week or two. Then the
real key is if you are doing any updating and additions MSN's
spider will keep coming back very often to do updates.
Of course as an http://dallas-seo.blogspot.com/>SEO
Specialist, I like the fact that MSN indexes my client's
sites quickly and that it still assigns a lot of weight to "on
page factors" which I can easily control but if you look at this
situation only as a optimizer, you miss the real important
factor about what MSN is doing right in indexing quickly and
giving reasonable weight to on page factors. Simply put if you
are looking for the most diverse content and specifically new
content on any given subject right now you will find the least
dominance by giant corporations and the most relevant, new and
useful content on MSN. Now if you take nothing else from this
article understand the following point.
"People do not go online on a daily basis to buy things any
more then they listen to the radio daily to buy things. They go
online for information and entertainment and search engines have
become the means to find those resources. When they then need to
buy something online they generally use the search engine that
most often helps them find entertainment and information for
daily use to begin looking for the item they want to purchase.
Google succeeded in drawing the most visitors due to its'
ability to connect people with information and entertainment not
for its' ability to sell products".
So why is this so important? Because it was speed of indexing
and the ability to show users the most relevant content that
made Google the choice for people who wanted to be educated or
entertained and today it is MSN that is providing the most up to
date and in most areas, the most relevant information. MSN also
currently has the biggest problem with spam, however if they can
gently correct that with out placing too much weight on anchor
text I think MSN will have a real winner on their hands.
To conclude let's go back to the radio analogy so the full
ramifications of up to date, accurate and relevant organic
search results can be understood for the power they have. For a
radio station advertising is NOT the "product" they are selling.
The real product is the information and entertainment that they
provide and that is what gives them a base of listeners. Once
they have that base of loyal listeners they can then sell
advertising as a source of revenue. Many things drive listeners
to choose a station such as the music they play, the DJs they
have or the advertising the radio station does for itself. Yet
what makes any station successful is simply the number of people
that tune in and listen on a daily basis.
In the search engine world it is the organic listings that are
the "product" all the "sponsored listings" are just that,
advertising. So just like in the world of radio the search
engine that provides the best product will in time get the most
users and as they do that the value they can offer to their
advertisers goes up and there fore so does the amounts they can
charge and the number of advertising slots they can sell.
Only time will tell if MSN can truly capture as much or even
more of the search market then Google but their growth is quite
impressive so far. In July of 2005 MSN Search had about 12% of
the total search market, as of December of 2005 that number grew
to about 22%. That is almost a 100% increase in only 5 months.
So it does indeed seem that MSN is at least currently on the
right path toward one day becoming the "better mouse trap".
About the author:
As a the head of http://www.search-engine-marketing-services.net>search
engine marketing services for MasterLink a Dallas Web Design Company,
Jack Spirko and his team are responsible for overseeing internet
marketing services including: search engine optimization,
pay-per-click campaigns, email marketing, landing page
optimization and all aspects of our internet marketing por