MSN Vs Yahoo search engine.

We always had the habit of debating Google and Yahoo for a change now let us debate between Yahoo and MSN or Yahoo vs. the new Microsoft Bing Search engine.



Primarily most of us will just conclude Yahoo is the much better compared to MSN. In most cases I agree with that when you see the below image from hit link it shows a clear trend where yahoo is well ahead than MSN.



Yahoo was once very dominant and was getting about 30% of search engine traffic. But as Google grew it made it very dominant and much stronger in some places in US market share of Google is well above 90%. 3 years back Yahoo results were powered by Google so virtually Yahoo's market share is Google's market share. Now they are an independent search engine and they power a lot of search engines. So I am sure Yahoo is a search engine here to stay.
As a SEO company we monitor a lot of logs of our clients. In most cases we see consistent performances from Yahoo when rankings are similar in all top 3 search engines. So I see no point in comparing who is better Yahoo or MSN. But wait it's not all over. After years of being an underdog Microsoft cant anymore to get back their search engine market share. They came down with a bang with the search engine called Bing. So did Bing work indeed yes? They excess advertising of Bing and the improved quality of results made Bing instant famous and already a hit. Bing as far as I tested has much better quality results than the MSN live search and MSN Global search. I am sure Bing is here to stay we need to see few more months whether they can steal any percentage of Market share from Google. It's just 15 days from launch and too early to say whether they will be dominant. But there are early signs it will be a success story.



Wall street Journal reports
"The number of times people clicked on ads listed next to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) search results jumped about 8% in the week since the software giant released its newly revamped search engine, dubbed Bing, the world's largest search engine marketing firm said Thursday."

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090611-716373.html

Bloomberg reports
"Microsoft's share rose to 11.1 percent in the June 2-6 period, Bing's first week in operation, from 9.1 percent a week prior, ComScore said on its Web site. Average daily penetration among searchers, a measure of how many people are being reached by the product, rose to 15.5 percent from 13.8 percent."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a0xxEn3GGCd0

We never know what the future holds for search engines. I am sure there will be some real tough competitors for Google.

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Bing replaces Microsoft Live search:

At last Microsoft has come up with a search engine which I feel can be a serious competitor for Google. Results are just amazing from the past 6 years I am with search engines this is the first time MSN has come up with somewhat clean results. It just looks amazing I really appreciate Microsoft for bringing this product.

I just some searches for our websites as well as our client websites and almost all of them are doing well and the results are very similar to Google. There are some areas that needs to be cleaned especially the geo-targeting is too uneasy. I can see a lot of .au domains poping up when I search from India. This is natural when geo targeting exists and I see it visibly. Overall results are far better than MSN live results and I am sure there is some future for Bing search engine. I can see there might be some bugs in search results but its perfectly acceptable since the search engine is very new. Google was terrible when it came out especially with all the spammers ready to exploit Google was bad when it came out but it improved and proved to be a really worthy search engine today. I am sure Bing will one day remove the monopoly of Google in search engine industry. I personally like Google but their decision making is becoming too aggressive and I see lots of innocent sites getting affected due to this aggression. I hope Bing stops this aggression of Google.

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Microsoft wants Google, Yahoo on board before it adopt rules

Microsoft said, Google and Yahoo to cut the time they keep users search-engine records and to agree to the European demand. On Sunday in telephone interview, Brendon lynch, the company's director of privacy strategy said Microsoft is able to meet the requirements, it wants to waits until its larger search rivals get in to board.

A group of European union officials dubbed the articles 29Data Protection Working Party have asked search engine to purge their user records after six months.

Brendon Lynch said proposals are feasible, but they want them to adopt it industry wide. If Microsoft alone adopts the 29Data Protection Working Party then it would not have broad impact on its users in Europe because the market share there is very small.

Cutting the length of time that search engines maintain such records could munch into advertising revenue, the core source of sales for Google and Yahoo. The companies rely on users queries to target advertising that have raised privacy question, since all the search engine have track where customer go online and what they read and buy.

In April, the Article 29 group said Search engine providers break their EU privacy law, by retaining the online search data for more than six months. The association is made up of data-protection officials from the 27 EU nations and from three non-Eu countries, including Norway.

Google have decided to cut the time and to keep data to nine months. In July 2007, Microsoft said after 18 months it will remove identifiers from individual search data. In the same month Yahoo said it would adopt a 13-month cutoff. Both Microsoft and Yahoo follow Google in European internet search traffic. According to the research company ComScore, Google has almost 80 percent of the market, while Microsoft and Yahoo together acquire about 4 percent.

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Yahoo and Microsoft gain more market share but still Google leads way ahead

Some of the popular websites are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, & Ask. Among these search engines Yahoo & Microsoft showed increment where as Google declined to great extent compared to previous years. The percentage of searches handled in US by five search engines are 61.5%, 20.9%, 9.2%, 4.1%, & 4.3%. Finally, a change - Google slips while Yahoo and Microsoft gain. Now there comes a question whether Google is in trouble?? The answer will obviously be no because of raw number of searches, June 2008 was another record breaker for Google. But Google dropped from 61.8% in May 2008 to 61.5% in June 2008, the first time a share drop has been shown over the past year since December 2007 (when it went from 58.6% to 58.4%).On other hand Microsoft showed its first gain in the past year.

After many months of incremental decline, Microsoft rose from an 8.5% share in May 2008 to 9.2% in June 2008. This is likely a factor in Microsoft's rise. By this it has achieved great success but at the same time Microsoft is hoping that program will generate more than a 0.7% rise in its share, and that's all it has gotten so far. Clearly the program isn't a massive initial game changer that some thought it to be. Instead, if Cash back is going to be a success, clearly now it will be something that happens over time. Let's see if that indeed happens in the coming months.

The other hand even yahoo too is showing a rise. After months of drops with the occasional rise, Yahoo posts two straight months of gains, i.e. 20.4% in April 2008 to 20.6% in May, then 20.9 percent in June 2008. I think there's great rise in Yahoo & Microsoft. Lets see the actual number of searches each handled versus market share:
Google: 7.1 billion
Yahoo: 2.4 billion
Microsoft: 1.1 billion
Ask: 501 million
AOL: 471 million
By this we can tell that Google still shows a gain. Google went over the 7 billion searches served mark. Whereas Yahoo, at 2.4 billion searches, & Microsoft, at just over 1 billion searches, which didn't break any past records but at least got closer to territory it held a year ago. On the whole there is a great increment in yahoo & Microsoft compared to previous years & Google declined a bit but then too created a record!

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Google And Microsoft still fighting for yahoo

Microsoft Google Fight for Yahoo
Google has recently signed up a contract with Yahoo to serve Ads on Yahoo's Search Results. Though critics call this deal against ethics and will spoil the competition in Search Engine industry Yahoo is ready to go ahead with it.


On the other Hand Microsoft offered Yahoo A billion dollar Annually for Advertising in Yahoo's search results. According to a Reuters News Source


"Microsoft Corp offered Yahoo Inc $1 billion in cash to buy its search business in a deal that would have delivered $1 billion in additional annual operating income to Yahoo, a source familiar with Microsoft's thinking said on Friday.
In an alternative to a full acquisition, Microsoft would have taken control of Yahoo's search business, delivering the company better rates for advertisements tied to its search results than Yahoo's current Panama advertising system, the source said.
Microsoft would have also paid $8 billion to take a 16 percent stake in Yahoo, which would have valued the company's stock at $35 a share, the source said."

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Is Microsoft indirectly going for a Proxy fight?

BLB&G LLB group is taking on Yahoo on behalf of some share holders for not accepting Microsoft bid. this page has some very useful information that's just revealed.

On February 21, 2008, BLB&G, on behalf of Plaintiffs, filed a Class Action Complaint against Yahoo and its board of directors (the "Board"), alleging that they have acted to thwart a non-coercive takeover bid by Microsoft, which would provide a 62% premium over Yahoo's pre-offer share price, and have instead approved improper defensive measures and pursued third party deals that would be destructive to shareholder value. Yahoo's "Just Say No to Microsoft" approach is a result of resentment by the Board, and not any good faith focus on maximizing shareholder value. Microsoft attempted to initiate merger discussions in late 2006 and early 2007, but was rebuffed, supposedly so Yahoo's management could implement existing strategic plans. None of those initiatives improved Yahoo's performance. On February 1, 2008, over a year after its initial approach, Microsoft returned, offering to acquire Yahoo for $31 per share, representing a 62% premium above the $19.18 closing price of its stock on January 31, 2008.

Looks like the proxy fight is about to move forward more aggressively. Lets wait and see

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MSN's ridiculous search results - when do they improve?

As a SEO company we regularly monitor top search engines and the quality of Search results provided by them. Of the top 3 Search Engines ( Google, Yahoo , MSN ) MSN has the most ridiculous search results. Believe it or not their search results have never improved in Quality for the past 2 years. We say this not because our sites and client sites are not ranking in their search. In fact we have much better ranking in MSN than Yahoo and Google. Our frustration is towards sites that rank in places that never should be.

Still there is lot of spam in MSN results sites which uses excessive cross linking , excessive paid links, keyword stuffing all work well with MSN results. If you see yahoo especially with the latest update their results are almost competing with Google results. Their relevancy has improved a lot but MSN is still lagging behind very badly.

Their Geo targeting goes crazy when i search for generic phrases like car transport , auto transport etc. When i search from Indian Office i see results of sites in Australia, UK, India, US all mixed. I feel this is poor geo targeting.

I seriously want MSN to improve their search results its nowhere near the quality of Google. OK enough of ranting back to Job,

SEG

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Microsoft's Lost Love with Yahoo - A Contemporary version



We all know Microsoft has walked away from Yahoo's bid for 43 Billion dollars. Our Graphics team has beautifully portrayed on this recent issue. Enjoy the images.

microsoft yahoo a contemporary version

microsoft lost love

microsoft yahoo proposal

microsoft yahoo broken relationship
Kamesh is a dedicated graphics designer for Search Engine Genie and has completed lot of projects for us.


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