Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I "OWN" MSNSEARCH. In the keywords pairs (that are of any significance to me) I end up in the number 1,2,3,4 and so on position organically on a lot of keyword pairs.
How can those two indexing and ranking schemes be wildly different. My guess is that google is being gamed to death. Any ideas?
MSN - [search.msn.com...]
Google - [google.com...]
Because MSN blows chunks.
"I end up in the number 1,2,3,4"
qed
Google honestly is such a pain in the ass - you can't spend your whole life trying to figure out or predict their next move.
I don't think Google's search results are anymore relevant at all than MSN or Yahoo, it's just that Google is where the majority of people search. Actually I'm disappointed in their response to my submission of ur's that are completely unrelevant - there are a couple of websites that show up on the first page in the U.S. anytime you type in a city name. You can do a search for 'Dentist in Atlanta' and this website which is basically a weather webiste will come up as the #2 and #4 ranking for that query. It makes no sense! They haven't fixed this and has been going on for 6 months.
A simple example is that any url which has more than 2 dashes in it (mainly sites using url-rewriting) will be totally ignored by MSN Search! I mean urls like this : [mysite.com...] ... so LOADS of news pages or blogs will never rank well on MSN Search, nor will their backlinks be considered, and this only because of many dashes in the url.
Frankly MSN Search is not a good search engine.
1. Spam MSN (in a smart way)
2. Do really good SEO
And you'll get great results on MSN, even for highly competitive terms.
I do not know your situation or circumstances, but this is not the case for me at all on MSN.
However, if you were to do a site operator on my-site.com and if there is a double hyphenated domain like my--site.com, google will show the single hyphen results for both sites. Thats a little off topic from what you were saying, but as far as mysite.com/this-is-the-news.html and MSN I think that might be something you are seeing specific to your area/niche?
One likes coke, one likes pepsi, another likes fresh juice and another likes warm beer.
MSN delivers almost no traffic to a site of mine that google considers authoritative. On that site, MSN is 5th behind Ask Jeeves.
On new sites, and one older one, MSN almost always sends me as much traffic as Google.
You aren't going to get anywhere by asking why they aren't ranking you the same.
Yea, but in the long run MSN has the $$$ to outrun google. Thats a fact and not an opinion.
Google's coffers are by no means weak compared to Microsoft's.
Yea, but in the long run MSN has the $$$ to outrun google. Thats a fact and not an opinion.
No, that is uninformed opinion.
While MS has a bigger war chest, they cannot spend it all on search.
And as MS has proven time and again, throwing money at a problem does not guarantee success. MS has a great history of succeeding with their products, and another great history of failing when they try to provide services. Search is a service.
They might win it yet, but the $$$ argument is a non-starter.
I do not agree, you are talking about a company who has most of their assets in cash.. Look at their financial statements. Your talking about a corporation that could probally purchase google if they wanted to.
And no, MSFT's 4 billion in cash cannot buy out a 100 billion dollar company with 5.5 billion in cash.
Even if MSFT *can* afford to cough up a lot of money on search, that still doesn't change their history of failure when it comes to offering services, even when they throw billions at the "problem". You only have to look back one year to the huge billion dollar marketing push to dethrone AOL as the dialup king.
Bill likes a battle, but he ain't stupid enough to risk his core products when fighting for a new field.
If there were no significant differences, something would be very odd and a court case might soon be pending for patent infringement or industrial espionage.
In the long run I think most will agree that Microsoft will take the market.
With the exception of an unprecedented level of stupidity or bad luck (could happen) this is indeed almost guaranteed. When MSN search is the default search engine for all Vista applications most people will switch. Principally because to a casual user they all look the same anyway. The 'average user' couldn't care less after all.
As for relevancy, I tend to find MSN pretty good. As someone pointed out it's a vague concept, so who can say? On the whole though I am finding Google increasingly erratic, an issue quite separate from relevance. I believe it is this inability to operate smoothly that will kill them in the end, not how 'good' their results are.
Another issue that will increasingly factor into this is hype. MS have been pretty quiet about Search on the whole. Yet Google is hyped beyond their actual capabilities. Given that Google is now publicly traded then investor confidence is paramount, something they never had to contend with in the past. Although SEOs can't really affect Google directly (they serve searchers, not webmasters etc) they can be effective in shaking confidence in the long-term prospects of the company in the eyes of the investors. This is further complicated by the fact that Google make all their money in one way, whereas MS don't.
One likes coke, one likes pepsi, another likes fresh juice and another likes warm beer.
And we're all better off for it. As long as the different SE's like different pages, you stand a chance of doing well in at least one of them, rather than uniformly poor in all (uniformly great in all is nice, but you can't hope for perfection). If we could have a couple more serious players join the game, and have 5 SE's that count instead of 3 (sharing about 20% of the searches each), both webmasters and users would benefit.
After all, once google went public, the spreadsheet guys absolutely rule - do they not?
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, may I mention that Microsoft is also a public company? :-)
There's a far simpler reason why Google and MSN Search have different results: They're different search engines created by different teams. Considering how many pages are competing for the top 10 spots for all but the most obscure search terms, it's amazing that there aren't more differences in the results from the three major search engines.
Considering how many pages are competing for the top 10 spots for all but the most obscure search terms, it's amazing that there aren't more differences in the results from the three major search engines.
Very true, and it would be nice to have even greater differences. By checking all three, you can sometimes find very pertinent sites that are only listed in one, but really, the similarity of the serps is too much. Maybe that's all there really is, and the internet is truly as shoddy as it seems; but maybe a new SE with a fresh approach would list sites currently buried in the dross that we can't find now.
and msn results are more acurate lately or maybe i just being greety an want people to use msn lol.
Anyways like most people say each search engine uses its own alog but right now msn is kicking google behind in accuracy.
MSN is a publicly shared company but does not depend on search engines to solely fund its coffers. Since google has been chasing its tails since big daddy and it looks like it will be some time until they fix it I would say investors are already a bit shaken.
Now, if you had a million dollars to invest today and you know that google depends on relevancy for searches to make its $$$ where would you invest? I know I would invest in MSN because the searches performed there are very relevant. Google will continue to chase its Big DUDDY tail for quite some time.
I wonder if the google engineers forgot the old adage (KISS) Keep its simple stupid! Some times people over complicate things such as 301's and duplicate content.
Instead of having every webmaster 301 their pages why do they not put the fix on their end? Seems like a few engineers could figure things out and save a lot of webmasters time and $$$. Another thing, duplicate content, how many retailers out there have manufacturers information or instruction on their websites? Umm, probally a lot of us since we should not be rewriting manufacturers instructions due to liability reasons. Food for thought....
It will be interesting to see if MS Vista will create more of a balance, if, as mentioned here, the default search browser will be MSN.
Whatever way it goes, one has to admire both Bill Gates, and the biys from Google, in creating such successful companies.
