Reno - 8:03 pm on Mar 4, 2009 (gmt 0)

Unlike Google or Yahoo, MS does not appear to have a consistent strategy in regards to search. First they try this, then they try that. It looks to me that they are still looking to find their footing and develop a niche, and to date that's not been terribly successful. In fact, given their size, money, power, and reach, I don't think it's unfair to say they've failed.

One thing they clearly need to do is to get the core basics right before changing the skin. For example, when I go through my Webmaster Tools at MSN, I see that they've not managed to visit some webpages on well developed sites since last Oct '08. And yes, I had submitted them the sitemap.xml and yes, those pages are well linked into the home page. Their bot just can't seem to find them, even though googlebot and yahoo/slurp come by on a regular basis. Now I don't care what they say -- that's SE 101 and they just ain't gettin' it. And until they do, I don't hold out a heck of a lot of hope for their "next big thing".

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