New MSN search engine: How good is it?

If you have an online business or you just use Internet as one of your marketing tools, you know that how important the search engines are in your quest to get more targeted visitors to your website. The changes in search engine field can have unexpected outcome for your online endeavors. That's why it is important to be well-informed on impending progress in this sphere

Microsoft has recently come out with the latest beta version of its much touted search engine. Supported by 5 billion indexed pages, it is poised to become one of the most powerful search engines in the market. Right now MSN is using Yahoo provided search results for queries done through its search page, which it's planning to change somewhere in early next year with its own. You can check out the search engine at http://beta.search.msn.com.

Google's immense success and profitable business model enticed Microsoft and others to look into lucrative search engine market seriously. Amazon, for example, has recently launched its web search site A9.com. Today, Google carries out almost 50 percent of all searches on the Internet. Yahoo with 24 percent of the market share is trailing in a distant second place. MSN with 14 percent lags far behind from the competitors – a situation, which won't be very easy to change.

However, Microsoft has a long history of copying booming products; make their replicas some times, arguably, better then the originals, and clinch larger portion of the market shares. Microsoft has successfully done this to Borland's dominance of programming languages in the early days. The list of victims continued with once utterly popular word processor –WordPerfect, market dominant spreadsheet – Lotus 1-2-3, Novell's Netware and finally Netscape. Since 90 percents of all personal computers run on Windows, Microsoft gets an extra edge against its competitors, which it's capable of exploiting very effectively.

Source:http://www.lilengine.com/

Google's New algorithm

Google has implemented a new algorithm, so that pages with a higher PageRank get crawled more frequently. The evidence for this is strong, and has developed only over the last few days.

What are the philosophical implications of this new move?

Previously, PageRank was a major determinant of how deeply your site was crawled (particularly if you had a very deep site), and of course it has always been a major determinant of how your pages ranked on Google searches.

Now it is also a determinant of how frequently your pages are crawled. It looks like the highest-ranked pages might get crawled once every other day, or perhaps even more frequently. (The evidence suggests that this is a per-page PageRank, not an overall site home-page PageRank, so that the top, shallow layers of your site will enjoy more frequent crawls than the deeper pages.)

For pages with average-to-low rank, where these pages also contain time-sensitive material, will this new algorithm put them at a serious disadvantage? It will appear to Google searchers that they are constantly stale when compared to higher-ranking sites, when in fact this is a function of Google's new algorithm.

Does this new algorithm increase the "tyranny of the majority" problem that some have already complained about with respect to PageRank? It will make the Washington Post, the new York Times, and CNN happy, but does it also make Google more elitist?

Does this matter to anyone? Should Google try to compensate for this by giving public-sector (.org, .edu, .gov) sites a bump in PageRank? Do they do this already?

Google sees slower growth ahead

Decline in growth is 'inevitable' as revenues increase, the search giant has warned

Google does not expect to maintain the same pace of revenue growth it has recorded over the last several quarters, the company acknowledged on Thursday in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The search leader, whose revenue reached $805.9m in the third quarter -- a 15 percent increase over the second quarter -- said it does not expect to keep up a similar pattern down the road based on an "inevitable decline in growth rates" as its revenue increases.

"We believe that our revenue growth rate from the second quarter to the third quarter of 2004 may not be sustainable into the fourth quarter of this year and in future periods," Google noted in the SEC filing.

In fact, Google said it expects its revenue growth rate to decline over time and anticipates that there will be "downward pressure" on the company's operating margin.

Google also reported that it may experience a drop off in advertising sales as it revamps its business policies. Specifically, the company said that steps it is taking to improve the relevance of its ads, such as removing those that generate low click-through rates, could hurt its revenue.
The company conceded in the filing that it faces "formidable competition" in every aspect of its business, particularly from rivals Yahoo and Microsoft. Google highlighted the fact that Microsoft recently launched a beta version of its latest search technology and that the software maker has repeatedly detailed plans to further integrate search features into its Windows operating system.

"We expect that Microsoft will increasingly use its financial and engineering resources to compete with us," Google said in the filing. "Yahoo has become an increasingly significant competitor, having acquired Overture Services, which offers Internet advertising solutions that compete with our AdWords and AdSense programs."

In related news, Microsoft announced on Thursday that it has extended its ad placement agreement with Overture until 2006, even as the software giant builds its own array of search technologies. Under the deal, the Yahoo subsidiary is paid to provide advertising distribution services to Microsoft's MSN Web portal.

Google said Microsoft and Yahoo may have a greater ability to attract and retain Net users than Google does in the future, because its two rivals operate expansive Web portals that offer a range of content and services.

"If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better Web search results compared to ours, or leverage their platforms to make their Web search services easier to access than ours, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic," Google said in the filing. "Any such decline in traffic could negatively affect our revenues."

Google had its initial public offering in August and began trading at $85. On Thursday, the stock was trading at $169.21.

Google Algorithm Change

It seems Google is changing its algorithm or doing some sort of change that stirring things up. Ive been seeing many sites that were in top positions disappear and vice versa.

Google ranking page-titles differently i.e. if the page titles contain your keywords, it doesn't seem to make any difference anymore. You can rank high even without the keyword in the title

is this true?

Or perhaps the weighting given to body text has been raised slightly and/or title text lowered.

We know that anchor text is a very important factor and at times trumps title text.

Maybe some competitors picked up a few more solid links with good anchor text; or maybe they changed the site navigation; or maybe just about anything.

Anyone else noticing these changes?

Feedback Appreciated

hi

Uncover the Net

A great looking new directory.

The premise is brilliant: You get 4 links on the category page; 1 to your site and 3 to content pages of your choice. You also get 4 links on a "business card page" plus links on "new sites" and "search results" pages.

Currently only 24.95 to submit your site, but this is a new directory and the price is likely to increase as PR increases.

Source:http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/

Microsoft finally releases the beta version of its proprietary search engine

Whats the difference?

Following are the some of the features of new MSN Search

For over a year, webmasters and SEOs have seen evidence of MSNbot spidering their sites as MSN-Search gathered information and compiled its database. Microsoft's full entry to the world of search engines will have fairly significant effects on the industry. Up to this point, MSN displayed results from the Yahoo/Overture database. A preview shows highly relevant results under a variety of keyword phrases. Relevant results, coupled with the search engine's clean design and piggybacking on the MS Windows operating system, MSN Search could provide a serious challenge to Google's current dominance of the organic search market.

New MSN Search Beta Gets Local, Personalized

Microsoft is expected today to take the wraps off the beta of its new search engine, which incorporates natural language, local and personalized search features. The service is available at beta.search.msn.com.

The most interesting aspects of the launch are the search refinement tools, which have local and personalization elements. Search Near Me lets users tailor searches to a geographic location, which they specify in their settings. If the searcher doesn't indicate a location, Microsoft returns results based upon the user's IP address.

The company decides what results to return through a variety of means. When it began building its index, it looked at things like the location of the host and the geographical indicators (ZIP code, city, state) in the content of the pages. It then tagged each page with a geographical designation, which can be matched with a user's location.

The second tool set, Search Builder, adds a graphical interface to the typical advanced search features offered on most major engines. The interface, which utilizes horizontal slider bars, lets users incrementally adjust search results based upon three criteria: recency, popularity and preciseness of match.

Lets see how will ut gonna influence MSN.

Will MSN dumps google and Yahoo???

Come up with your views !!!!

Source: XMLmania.com

Traditional Search Engine Optimization VS. Pay Per Click

With the current rise of pay per click (PPC) advertising services such as Overture, Google AdWords and many others, professional search engine optimization (SEO) companies are having to deal more and more with the issue of why their clients should spend money on traditional SEO when they can simply "buy their way to the top."

Traditional Search Engine Optimization
First I will define what traditional SEO is. Search engine optimization is the process of fine tuning (otherwise referred to as optimizing) your web site to reflect specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business and for which you want to attract visitors to your site who are searching for such words.

This optimization relates to a variety of elements, not only on your web site's home page, but its sub pages as well. Those elements can include things like title tags, meta tags, alt tags, link structure, link popularity and the content of the site itself. Once your web site is properly optimized, the goal then is to make sure that each of the top crawler based search engines find your site and add as many pages as possible in their indices. These engines will usually start with your home page and then work their way to other pages of the site.

This is where another important aspect of SEO comes into play - making sure the sub pages or at least the main areas of your site are accessible from the home page. It can be assumed that if many of your pages are optimized for different keywords and can be found in the search engines, they will draw traffic to your site.

Search engine optimization also involves making sure your site is listed in the major directories such as Yahoo and Open Directory to name a few. I won't go into detail about proper directory submissions here as that is another topic of its own but will say that it is important to make sure you are listed in the right category and have a title and description that is reflective of the keywords you are trying to target.

Other elements of SEO include monitoring your positioning in the search engines, making adjustments as necessary to your site to stay in top position and submitting to new engines or directories that come along as well.

Pay Per Click
Now I will define what PPC is using Overture as an example. PPC or pay per click is a service in which an advertiser selects specific keywords or phrases and then creates a listing that will show up when someone searches for that phrase. The advertiser selects an amount they are willing to pay for each click on their listing which results in a visit to their site - thus the term "pay per click". At Overture, you can bid anywhere from $.10 up to $50.00 for each click.
If other advertisers have selected the same keyword or phrase as yours, you then are competing against them for the highest position. Whoever is willing to spend the most shows up first and the others following in order.

What makes PPC attractive in the case of Overture is that they distribute their paid listings to other partner sites. In fact, if you bid in one of the top three positions at Overture, your listings will also show up at some of the leading search engines including AltaVista, HotBot, InfoSpace, iWon, Lycos, MSN, Yahoo and others. They also show up in several meta crawlers and other minor search engines.

Therefore if you bid for top placement at Overture, you will show up at these partner sites as well. There are many other pay per click programs including Google AdWords, ah-ha.com, FindWhat, Sprinks and Looksmart to name a few. All function in a similar manner.

What PPC has allowed one to do then is to instantly "pay" their way to the top whereas traditional SEO takes a lot of time and effort.

The overriding question then is how valuable is PPC and should it replace standard search engine optimization techniques?

Pros and Cons of Pay Per Click
First of all you must understand that PPC will never help improve your positioning in the regular editorial search results. They most always appear in a "Sponsored or Featured" area which is usually at the top or side of the regular search results.
While it is nice to "show up first" there are still a lot of end users, myself included, that do not click on the "paid" listings but rather will search through the regular editorial search results.
Pay per click will not optimize your site so that it reflects who you are and what you offer. If your site is poorly optimized before you begin to advertise it with PPC, it will still be poorly optimized afterwards. Another downfall is that when you stop paying for PPC, it disappears and so does the traffic it brings!

On the other hand, a well executed SEO plan will improve your position in the regular editorial search results. You will have a finely tuned web site that reflects who you are and what you offer. You are not held hostage to having to continuously throw money at search engines to maintain your listings.

In most cases, once you have good positioning in the regular search results, you will continually receive free traffic. It may require some minor adjustments from time to time but all in all brings in consistent free traffic so long as people are searching for your products or services.
I am not saying that PPC is bad and you shouldn't do it for if you have the budget that will go beyond a traditional SEO campaign, then by all means, utilize PPC as well. You gain instant exposure and only pay for actual visitors to your site.

But never ever disregard SEO in place of PPC! SEO should be the foundation of your online marketing strategy because in the long run, the benefits of SEO will far outweigh anything else you do.

Source:Source:http://www.searchengineguide.com