I was looking at my traffic stats earlier, when I noticed something unusual. Take a look:
AWstats is annoying in that it doesn’t tell you which search engine sent you this, or from what page. So I dug into my logs, and I found this as the referrer:
http://search.live.com/result.aspx?q=sex&mrt=en-us&FORM=LVSP
Now, we all know the Live! search engine is still far from perfect, but why is it sending me traffic from the keyword “sex“? Unfortunately, this link doesn’t work, so I can’t tell exactly how this one person found my site through this search, but if anyone knows what FORM=LVSP stands for, I’d like to know, because this blog has nothing to do with sex.
That’s just more proof the Live! isn’t going to be competition anytime soon.
March 4th, 2007
posted in Blog History, Top, Windows Live |
9 comments
Google’s not going away for a long while as the top search. Why? It’s still got it. MSN, the #3 ranked engine, still doesn’t.
MSN recently filed a patent for removing duplicate search results, including removing organic results if the same page or site appears in the paid section. I have a feeling this is a “feature” that will never see the light of day because of how absolutely idiotic it is. I know why they’re doing this: the bottom line. It makes sense - if the organic listing is removed, people will be more likely to click on the paid listing, and M$ makes more money, right?
Wrong. Any decent search marketer with good, quality sites will immediately pull all money out of AdCenter because it’ll remove their natural ranking. And natural rankings are better because 1) they’re free and 2) they’re more trustworthy.
Once all these guys have pulled their money out, cost-per-click will drop drastically, meaning that the bottom for AdCenter earnings for publishers will drop out and they’ll be looking at a penny-per-click. Ouch. MS would, in one fell motion, blow the brains out of its entire ad operation.
On the other hand, Google just filed a patent for allowing people to remove pages from search results, and using this information to determine spam pages and affect ranking. That’s smart. Let the masses do the work of finding bad pages for you, and people have an incentive to do it.
When I run into a bad, spammy page, I don’t ever want to run into it again, so it would make sense spend the few extra seconds to remove it from my personalized search. Additionally, pages that deceive me in the search results would also earn my wrath. This new Google option would allow me to vent my anger by knocking the page out of my own listings, and putting a vote against it in the grand scale of the index.
Of course, there is the possibility of abuse, but I have faith that Google will have a stringent enough system in place to make it difficult, and have enough human fall-backs to catch the few cases that fall through the cracks.
Google: 1. MS: 0.
March 4th, 2007
posted in Top, Google Search, Windows Live, Google, Marketing |
no comments
The Windows Live search API is now out of beta. The requirements state you need to be running .NET on a Windows server, but if I understand correctly, there is/are .NET frameworks for linux systems? Cookie to the first person to tell me if I’m right or wrong.
Anyway, Live still has a ways to go until is algorithm catches up to Google and Yahoo!
February 7th, 2007
posted in Windows Live API, Windows Live |
no comments
