The History of MSN - Windows Live Search

Microsoft was late to enter the search market place and has failed until now to get the attention of the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) community. That is changing and no doubt the Windows Live Service will become a major force in search marketing.

MSN Search was launched in 1998 some years after both Yahoo! and Google had already taken dominant positions. Despite Microsoft´s size, it choose to serve results for Inktomi, which was ultimately consumed by Yahoo! The service was later augmented with result from Looksmart in 1999, as well as a short stint with result being served by Altavista. By 2004 Microsoft was able to move to serving results from its own index that had been built over the previous 2 years, with weekly and daily crawls of the Internet.

In September 2006 MSN Search was renamed Windows Live Search offering many of the services found on both Google and Yahoo! These services include; web search, news, images, music, local and desktop. One additional, useful piece of functionality unique to Windows Live Search is the ability to directly access Windows Encarta (the popular encyclopaedia). However, many in the Search Engine Optimisation community question the value because of the dominance of sites like wikipaedia.com. Microsoft believes that its service will not just rival those of Google and Yahoo! but will be better at matching content to the searchers needs. We´ll wait to see if that proves to be the case, as Microsoft will need to break the brand dominance of the other major search players who already have huge numbers of very loyal users.

In September 2006, Microsoft launched it own Pay per Click (PPC) service, having dropped Yahoo! owned Overture. The service, called MSN AdCentre allows advertiser to target against keywords, geography, age and gender, and specific times of the day. Unite Search Marketing was an early beta partner with Microsoft operating a number of campaigns within Europe. Microsoft boast some 420 million unique users and whilst that number is bound to grow, it is still behind the market leaders, Yahoo! and Google.

The search engine marketing community has raised a number of questions over the privacy of MSN users as the AdCentre service relies on data gathered in a number of ways. Information is gathered from other Microsoft services as well as from third party data sources in order to generate a demographic profile of the audience against which an ad can be bought. Microsoft has made numerous statements concerning its high privacy standard but no doubt someone will challenge it!

Despite Microsoft´s late entry into the Search and Paid Advertising space they are bound to do well. They have a number of good tools and have massive reach. We´ll no doubt see convergence with other Microsoft properties such as the serving of ads into the Xbox Live platform, and the huge opportunities that Vista, Messenger and Hotmail will afford.

We´ll regularly revisit this page and add to the history of this major new entrant to the Search landscape.

www.live.com and www.live.co.uk