MSN dumps Yahoo! In favour of search beta
24 January 2005
Microsoft's search results are now being provided by MSN Search (beta) rather than Yahoo!
MSN had an agreement with Yahoo! to provide users with search results, but the company has been developing its MSN Search service for months.
The software firm's MSN Search (beta) robot "MSNbot" has been spidering the web to index and prioritise hundreds of millions of webpages.
Microsoft will prove a daunting rival to the more established Google and Yahoo! search engines, with its hefty spending power.
The new MSN search engine is being developed in-house by Microsoft and will be used to replace Yahoo! on the site once the code is finalised. During initial tests, MSN beta was able to index more than five billion web documents, despite disappointing outages.
"Some may notice that we have been recently scaling up and scaling down the MSN Search beta service," Just Osmer, MSN product manager for Search, told BetaNews. "This continues to be part of our testing process as we near the final version and incorporate user's feedback. Until we fully launch the site, you may expect to see various changes occurring."
MSN is currently losing millions of dollars in advertising revenue from Yahoo! and will be keen to establish a profitable advertising model as soon as possible. The entrance of Microsoft to the search market is likely to have widespread repercussions for the search marketing sector.
Apply for your free web assessment - get a complete health check and optimisation action plan from Weboptimiser, the experts.
Related news
|
|
Leading brand search engine marketing since 1996
Founded in 1996 as an SEO company, Weboptimiser is today one of the Internet marketing sector's best-known and most respected search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) search engine marketing companies.
With a unique portfolio of brand-friendly services, including usability, contextual advertising and web analytics, a pioneering methodology that covers all 4 stages of interaction between a web site and its visitors, we make our clients sites faster, smarter, busier and more profitable.
