MSN

MSN (literally standing for Microsoft Network) has revamped its look, its name, and its purpose over the past few years. MSN's search engine is far less important than that of Google and Yahoo. Since Microsoft was already an established company, they created MSN for the sole purpose of being a content viewer. Since their new content viewer required users to have a computer with higher performance standards than were readily available at the time, they ended up putting MSN on the back burner until 1999. When MSN rolled out with its new web portal, they put their faith in its success by making the default homepage of all Microsoft computers MSN. They also offered all of MSN's services, and eventually merged with Yahoo in the area of instant messaging to further their success in instant messaging. MSN as far as search engine optimization goes, is not one to worry too much about. They do not have established algorithms like those of Google and Yahoo and their search results in general are often sketchy. We have used MSN a number of times to compare results to that of Google or Yahoo. We have found these results to come back as spam, totally irrelevant to what we were looking for, and sometimes there are even web pages that don't exist anymore. They most definitely need to improve their algorithm to increase their marketshare. The name alone will not do it.

MSN started its overhaul in 2007, and has just about completed it. Now that everything has changed names from MSN to Live, people speculate that they are working on an MSN SEO formula. It remains to be seen, however. As far as search engine optimization for MSN, if your site was to beat out all the junk and irrelevant content they have listed in the search engine results, it is probably no different than that of Google or Yahoo. If the words that are being searched for come up in your website, more than likely they will end up on MSN, now called Windows Live Search. With this overhaul, many speculate that there is something good as far as MSN and SEO is concerned around the corner. Until then, we can only wait and see what they come up with.