So, Live Search is availiable on Facebook. What does that mean from a search visibility perspective? Even though Live Search has a very small take on the search market, this development will bring a lot of search users their way. With over a hundred million users, Facebook represents a great resource for Live Search. Showing organic results within Facebook is certainly going to have an impact on Live Search’s overall performance.

Let’s take for example the UK user base on Facebook, which is about 8.3 million active users per month. If you’re a UK company, looking to show up in organic search results, or sponsored search results, this is a great chance to get exposure to a concentrated audience.

Let’s say the usage rate for web search stabilizes at about 10% of Facebook users, projected on UK users, that’s about 830K active search users per month. If we factor in the percentage take of particular search patterns, we’d get the number of potential visitors to our UK based site. Sounds like a small number, but when you think about it tens of thousands of potential visitors who’d be searching for targeted search patterns is a significant source of visits, and with a moderate to significant probability of conversion. If a company offers products or services globally, the numbers escalate dramatically.

Question is whether Facebook users will indeed adopt Live Search based results on FB as their primary source for search needs, at least if they spend a lot of time on Facebook. If that proves to be the case, then Microsoft may just have found a way to increase their presence on the search market, even if by just a little bit. It will be interesting to see whether organic resutls and sponsored results get higher conversion when shown on Facebook. It’s time for testing, and I have a feeling some interesting results are going to show up.

Also see these posts:
Facebook blog
Livesearch blog

Share This

I have just read the BrowseRank document released by Microsoft regarding their work on a new alternative to PageRank and TrustRank.

Basically, the whole ranking algorithm comes down to giving more value to visitor behavior, as opposed to simply counting and valuating the number of links pointing towards a web page. Visitor clicks and time spent on a web page are key factors in determining its ranking potential.

The document explains the mathematical theories behind BrowseRank, and although this is more useful for search engineers, I got a pretty good picture of where they are going with this. The point is this is just the beginning, and there is a lot more work that’s going to happen before BrowseRank gains real validity.

Since it relies on recording user behavior, there are small obstacles in front of BrowseRank.

First of all there is the privacy issue (users have to opt-in for data to be gathered), and although their document states they used data from millions of visitors who opted in for the purpose of research, the question remains whether BrowseRank can actually work in the long term if it has to rely on users opting in to be tracked all the time. Not that we are not tracked already without permission by numerous web sites already, but that’s another story. I suppose social networking data can also be used to this effect (social bookmarking perhaps), but the other dimension is still critical - how will they manage to record time spent on pages in an easy and unobtrusive way?

What the document also mentions is that BrowseRank is a more valid measure of a page’s importance since it takes into account clicks and time spent on a page, and is thus more immune to manipulation techniques already present with PageRank. It is believed that a person will not click to a page and spend time there unless there is good content and their need for information has been answered. I think there is room for manipulation here as well, since you can theoretically engage an army of users to use a search engine, click on a specified result and go spend some time there, and gather “points” for a particular page to “help” it rank better for related search queries. Naturally, this is a very naive scenario, but quite plausible.

Nevertheless, BrowseRank is an interesting evolution of search, and is quite welcome in my opinion. Is it going to give Microsoft (Live Search) the edge to ride the same waves with Google and Yahoo? Well, I am just not sure. I think it’s going to take a lot more than that.

A really independent and safe way to rank content on the internet has yet to be found. Basically, if it involves people and their behavior, it’s going to be open to manipulation. Maybe we’ll get there some day, but not just yet… Anyway, my two cents.

Share This

So, Live Search has rolled out a new look for its home page. Well, it’s different, even interesting, but hopefully not the only thing they are going to change in their quest to improve their presence in the search arena.

In addition to this, Microsoft have published a document explaining their approach to ranking pages with a new rank criterion called BrowseRank (as opposed to Google’s PageRank, which they say is inferior to BrowseRank). Basically, BrowseRank is all about searcher online behavior (clicks and time spent on page) as a more accurate measure of a page’s importance, rather than simply relying on number of incoming links and on-page ranking factors. The BrowseRank document is available here, so check it out.

Share This

Live Search introduced some improvements to their search bot, mainly concerning bandwidth usage and crawling issues. Two major changes have been introduced:

1. HTTP Compression - static files and applications responses are now being packed using HTTP compression which reduces network load
2. Conditional Get - the bot will not download a page again unless it has been modified since the last crawl session; this is regulated according to RFC 2616 specifications

The user-agent signature has been updated to show msnbot/1.1.

Share This

It seems Microsoft has fixed the MSNBot issue, where the bot crawled sites calling non-existent files and accessing content through bogus search queries that had nothing to do with the actual content. In their blog post, the Live Search team have explained a couple of other issues they’ve been working on resolving:

• AdSense/Overture reporting
• Distorted site statistics with unfilterable bot traffic
• Polluted HTTP logs with inappropriate terms
• Microsoft wasn’t responding to questions

See the entire post here.

Share This

Microsoft announced the release a couple of new things yesterday - an accreditation progam called AdExcellence (similar to AdWords certification on Google), adCenter add-in for MS Excell 2007, and Webmaster Center (which has already been opened to the public a few days ago).

AdExcellence is a certification program designed to provide agencies and advertisers the opportunity of becoming certified adCenter experts and professionals. Upon successful completion candidates get a certificate and accompanying certification graphics for use on own websites.

The Excell 2007 adCenter add-in is a fully integrated tools for marketers allowing keyword research for targeting the most qualified traffic for their websites. Keyword data accessible from the add-in comes from the adCenter Keyword Services Platform (KSP), and the add-in itself will be available for download in early January 2008. The add-in basically uses web services to access information from adCenter, through KSP, although I imagine there could be far richer ways to integrate adCenter through Excell. Google has released AdWords Editor a while ago, a tool which enables marketers to control everything regarding their AdWords campaigns using a standalone desktop application. Microsoft seems to be working on such a tool for its AdCenter, but we have yet to see when such a tool will be released.

Share This

Live.com announced on their Live Search Webmaster Center Blog that Webmaster Tools is now officially open to all webmasters and professionals. Webmaster Tools was until recently in “private beta”, and only those who registered earlier could get an account and use the tools. If you haven’t registered for the private beta, now is the chance to open an account and start using Webmaster Tools. There isn’t too much to see there right now, and everything pretty much boils down to being able to check for crawling errors and submit a sitemap for faster/easier crawling. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more on the site in the future.

Share This

Microsoft has delivered on the announcement given in late August about opening Webmaster Portal (Center) to the public. The service is now live and available for general public at this address - webmaster.live.com . The official name is Live Search Webmaster Center.

Users are asked to authenticate administration rights for the sites listed in their account by uploading a specially created XML file or by inserting a tag in the META tags portion of the page code. Uploading the XML file seems like a much better solution in my opinion - easier and you don’t have to mess with changing page code.

Additionally, this post on the Live Search Official Blog invites everyone to visit the newly started Live Search Webmaster Center Blog for information and discussions about the new portal.

Share This

Following Live Search updates a few weeks ago, Microsoft has rolled out additional changes that are the end of Live Search service updates for this fall. Updates consist of the following:

Maps and Directions

• Innovative driving directions
• Innovative visualization and 3-D
• Innovative local content index including user-generated content
• Virtual Earth platform updates

Mobile Enhancements

• Live Search for Windows Mobile with voice input
• Live Search 411
• Live Search for use with BlackBerry® Devices

Read in more detail in their official press release.

Share This

Microsoft is planning to make available software that connects the Windows OS to services delivered over the Internet this week. This concept, often referred to as cloud computing, is part of Microsoft’s initiative that will connect the OS with online services. There was talk about cloud computing as something that may be the founding block of the new web (Web 3.0?), as Eric Schmidt said here. This move on Microsoft’s part may in fact put Microsoft back in the game. Microsoft cannot compete directly with its search engine, but with service and OS integration they will be able to keep their hundreds of millions of customers close and away from competitors such as Google or SalesForce.com, both of which offer plenty of software solutions online otherwise offered on desktop computers by Microsoft.

Microsoft’s desktop monopoly has been threatened for a long time by hundreds of companies who offer online services that require nothing more than Internet access and web browsers, while all data is stored on servers. As the industry is moving more towards the “on-demand model”, Microsoft is just in time with this change. Look forward to seeing Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger 8.5 and Windows Live OneCare Family Safety, as well as Windows Live Writer for blogging, with SkyDrive and FolderShare to join the list very soon as additional services for data storage. As Bill Gates put it “When you think storage, think Windows Live”. Microsoft aims to separate user data and applications from devices on which they are used. Windows Live Service will be available at Live.com soon, so stay tuned!

Share This