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I’m still pretty set in my ways. I’m still in love with Google, but I feel it is only fair to give the new MSN search engine an honest try. If you want to follow along click here to open up a new window for MSN search.

So far, everything looks pretty normal. Then I noticed a little box underneath the search bar called “Search Builder.” I clicked on it, and to my surprise I was pleasantly rewarded. A new menu opens up with options to create a search tailored to you. The Search Builder menu defaults to a “Search Terms” tab that allows you to choose terms that you want to exclude or include. The “Site/Domain” tab set up searched within a domain or excludes a particular domain. The “Links To” tab allows you to do a backlink search. The next tab “Country/Region” helps determine a geographic region for your search. Combine that with the following tab, “Language,” and you can create interesting searches. Now, none of this seems ground breaking to the people in the SEO world, but for the average user who rarely does little more then type in a phrase, this is big step in the world of search.

The final tab, I found the most interesting: “Results Ranking.” This tab allows you to play with MSN’s algorithm to get results tailored to your desires. If you want fresh data, you can specify that along with importance of link popularity and how closely your phrase matches what is on the page. This is a great tool to help create an online marketing campaign. By adjusting the different bars, you get to see how MSN views your site. You could use the popularity bar in conjunction with your keywords to figure out how aggressive of a link campaign is needed. You can play with the freshness bar to see what people are writing about your keyphrase and try to implement a blog to maintain your freshness.

All in all the basic search features seemed pretty good. I don’t know yet if I like the results I get, but I like having the flexibility of engineering a search around my needs. MSN been heavily promoting their new engine and I’m excited to see where their engine goes. Will Google be strong enough to outlast new engines, or will I be MSN’ing my searches in the years to come?

All of the files I use are on a mapped drive. This is not normally handled by the standard Google Desktop Search tool. But we’re in luck! Here is a registry hack that solves the problem.
I’ve done this and it seems to sort of solve the problem. It doesn’t appear that all of the files are being indexed on the mapped drive yet. I’ll be interested in seeing if it updates more over the weekend.
Google Desktop Search Tips

I saw that awhile ago Overture and MSN renewed their relationship regarding pay per click results listings. This means that for the next year MSN will serve up Overture sponsored results on MSN search pages. This is good news for everyone…but lurking in the shadows is most certainly a proprietary Microsoft paid search results engine much like Overture, but with results solely for MSN and their partners.

If this sounds confusing, it’s probably because I am a bad writer, not because it actually is confusing.

Basically what this means is that if you currently manage pay per click accounts, you most likely will use the Google AdWords program and Overture’s Precision Match program. These two paid search engines cover well over 85% of the internets search results and supply results for the big four search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

Here’s the catch;MSN recently created their own search engine after relying on Yahoo organic/free listings for years. Now when you search using the MSN search bar on their page or any of their partner pages, you will be served results straight from MSN’s own engine.

I predict that not far behind will be MSN’s new amazing, wonderful, all-inclusive, fabulous, better than all the rest, pay per click engine. They will not renew another contract with Overture for search results and then you will have to manage three separate paid search engines to reach the four major search engine results pages.

This could be a blessing at first, as the new bid prices would start lower just as they were low when paid search first hit the market. Eventually though the MSN engine will probably be just as expensive as the others.

It will certainly create a market for tools that can manage and manipulate bids on this new engine. Software companies are always looking for new ways to make our lives easier in the pay per click world and this engine will oblige them. Some will be nice enough to adapt their existing management tools to handle it, but some will create a brand new tool that you have to pay brand new money to use.

It makes total sense for Microsoft to do this and I am actually surprised they haven’t already implemented their own paid search engine. They kind of missed the boat when pay per click was really getting popular and now they are playing catch up. But you can never discount the power of excellent branding and internet presence, both of which they have in spades.

To summarize this rambling post, for now the pay per click is in a pretty stable place. By June of next year though, I expect some serious seismic activity in the paid search arena. Will it be good or bad? That depends on what side of the coin you’re on probably. For agencies like us it will be tough to adjust for awhile and reconfigure our billing structure to handle the changes. For the consumer it won’t make much difference at all I don’t think. There will still be sponsored ads in the search results, they’ll just be coming from a different source. So mark June 1st, 2006 on your calendar if you manage or purchase paid search campaigns. It’s going to be a day to watch.

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