MSN/Looksmart

Anyone know exact dates?

[rwallace]

I thought I heardx it mentioned that Looksmart will be dropped at the end of the year. True?

Thanks for any help,
RW

[tufty]

Hi,
It is already gone from msn.co.uk and it think that it is changing on msn.com about January 15th

[rwallace]

Wow, just looked at msn.co.uk... I really hope Bill can do better than THAT. What is THAT anyway? Sure doesnt look like inktomi...Is that a future picture of what The Gates Algo is going to serve up? If so, Jan 15th seo's and their clients will really feel how much Google doesnt own the SE world.

RW

[kanetrain]

Oh.... my goodness. Those really are horrible. I feel bad for the people over in the UK who have msn as their default search page. :) I'm almost laughing those are so bad.
I just did a search for a popular term in one of my industries... only one on the first page has ANYTHING to do with the industry and the site is just a feeder site to another... none of the 10-15 major players show up on the first page.

[rfgdxm1]

>Wow, just looked at msn.co.uk... I really hope Bill can do better than THAT. What is THAT anyway? Sure doesnt look like inktomi...Is that a future picture of what The Gates Algo is going to serve up?

It sure as heck ain't Inktomi. And, it sucks big time. Curiously, I am doing #1 on the three most important SERPs for my sites. The problem is the *wrong* site is coming up #1 on 2 of those SERPs. The reason why is that the main site (the second site is on a specialized topic covered by the main one) is NOWHERE to be found on msn.co.uk. This site is very well linked to; even an ODP and Yahoo! directory listing. From the crud that was in the rest of those SERPs, it looks to me like this index misses a huge percentage of sites on the Internet.

[makemetop]

>It sure as heck ain't Inktomi..

Oh, it is 100% Inktomi - but not as you are used to seeing it. The results are nothing like Pure Search but are identical to Inktomi with the UK boost algo turned to "medium", which is what they are!

Is there a UK or anything else boost algo? Go to Hotbot UK and try playing with the country geotargeting in the web filters. Take off the UK - medium button and all the results will show like Pure Search. Put on the US - medium button and the results will show as they are on MSN US.

Unfortunately, the geotargeting still messes up from time to time!