MSN Search Manually Penalizing Yahoo! and Google Content

Type search engine in MSN, what is missing?

[ddogg]

I have noticed something odd in a sector I follow. Yahoo! content was usually #1 for the keyword I look at. Then about last week some time I noticed it was gone. I can't find it in the top 10 pages. Now this keyword has ranked #1 in Google for a long long time. #1 in MSN for awhile too (months).

So I started checking out other keywords where Yahoo! typically ranks highly and found that I could not find any Yahoo! content on MSN Search, unless I add 'yahoo' in the search term. For an example type 'search engine' in MSN. Yahoo! and Google are curiously missing (along with other big engines).

I hate to think it but I believe MSN is manually removing their competitors from their search engine. Not banning them, just making it so they don't rank for any big terms when they should in fact rank very highly. I was hoping this was going to be a nice, unbiased search engine. Something that might some day really compete with Google. Perhaps I was being a bit naive.

Can anyone else confirm what I'm seeing? I don't follow many industries on MSN so I can't tell if they have done this recently across the board or just for a few sectors.

[RichTC]

Well what goes around comes around. Google currently have msn UKs home page down as a PR2 - i think thats says it all.

No love lost between Google and MSN thats for sure. Mind you a PR2 is probably about right!, but you cant expect msn to include google and Yahoo in their index if the favours not returned

[SuddenlySara]

Wow your right... Just used keyword search engine and no Yahoo or Google to be found on MSN.
Tried search engine in both Yahoo and Google and at least they show msn search on second page ;-)

Pretty sad I think.

[Matty21]

A little of topic but just so you know, MSN UK is pr2 because it is on a new subdomain (http://uk.msn.com) of the dot com and no longer on its original (http://www.msn.co.uk) and has been like that for about a month

[steveb]

Search for: search engine google.com
or
search engine google

and Google doesn't even come up. (Same with yahoo.)

Could be a conspiracy.
Could be because the MSN search engine blows chunks.

[stu_uk]

go to msn and search for "search" ;)