MSN News

MSN Search to offer users financial incentives

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 22:07:56 GMT

In an interview with computing.co.uk, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates reveals plans to try starve Google of their majority market share by attracting users to their competing search engine with financial incentives:

‘You will get some free content or a cheque, or some incentive to use a different search engine. Competition for users has not even kicked in. I can assure you it will not stay that way.’

He added that MSN will be testing such incentives as early as next year

Found via Threadwatch.

Video Talk with MSN Search Engineers

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 17:08:04 GMT

Channel 9, MSDN is hosting a interesting half-hour video featuring MSN search engineers Andy Edmonds, and Erik Selberg. They talk about the neural network technology that powers their search engine, and explain why they think manipulation of search engines will become more difficult in the future.

Hotmail BETA Screenshots

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 05:26:48 GMT

Ravings of a Mad Tech post some preview screenshots of the new Hotmail BETA (working title: Kahuna):

The beta is still largely private, mostly Microsoft employees, and in my humble opinion if it's going to compete with Gmail it still has a long way to go. I will say this, it is very stable and for additional email to backup a primary email it could be a good choice.

MSN AdCenter US Pilot Begins

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 19:38:15 GMT

Back in September we reported MSN's new AdCenter contextual search ads service test launch in France and Singapore. Today, according to Oilman, MSN have begun their US pilot of the service by invitiation only.

Microsoft's adCenter Live in Singapore & France

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 13:01:59 GMT

A Microsoft press release confirms, that as shceduled Microsoft have debuted their contextual search ad service -- branded adCenter / MSN Keywords -- but at this time only in France and Singapore.

Updates on further developments are available directly from MSN. SearchEngineWatch also has a bit more on this story.

Micrsoft Unveil Search Ads, Today

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 07:23:57 GMT

The New York Times reports, that Microsoft are today scheduled to launch their own service to sell search ads, which will compete with Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords.

To help strengthen their late entrance into the market, Microsoft will offer ads targeted by demographic for their publishers. Something, neither Google, or Yahoo currently offer.

It's unclear at this time if the service will be available to everyone at launch, or only to a limited number of testers.

SEO Book has more take on this story

mail.start.com

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:22:30 GMT

Start.com continues to innovate with mail.start.com now online:

Since Mail Beta is being built from the ground up with new technology, we encourage you to use all the features. Tell us what you like as well as what you think is missing or needs improvement. Please don’t hold back. We need and value your input. Thank you for your participation!

At the moment there is no way to register from the page, and at time of writing logging in with a regular MSN Hotmail account simple brought up the classic hotmail interface.

Thanks to ThreadWatch, for this find.

Start.com Goes Multilingual

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 19:49:17 GMT

Search Engine Watch notes, Start.com -- MSN's rapid development personalised start page -- now supports the following languages: English--Australian, English--US, English--UK, French, German, Italian. Japanese, Spanish, Spanish--US.