Tag Archives: msn

Whatever Happened to MSN's “AdSense” Anyway?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Back when Yahoo! first announced their plans for a pay-per-click advertising program to compete with Google’s highly-successful AdSense program, Microsoft also expressed interest in the field, and had decided to do likewise following the successful re-launch of its MSN Ads program. MSN Ads is basically AdWords – context-based pay-per-click ad campaigns directed at advertisers, not publishers. However, the adCenter re-launch was months ago (way back in May), and we were originally promised pay-per-click ads for publishers would debut some time in the Summer of ’06.

It does seem that the idea was scrapped, as a matter of fact, MSN adCenter was “looking for guinea pigs” since over a year ago. While some sporadic blog posts on the subject, the only contextual-advertising solution coming out of Microsoft’s camp any time soon is for advertisers who want in on the MSN Live Search ads. It seems that Microsoft has finally decided to stop re-inventing the wheel, and learn from the mistakes of others. Yahoo!’s own Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) isn’t doing too hot, so perhaps that’s a wise decision in the end.

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Google vs. MSN: What to Expect..

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Everyone has heard about the raging war between MSN and Google, and everyone is fighting to get their opinion about which is better in.. What most do not realize is that MSN and Google both (yes, Google too!) have their shortcomings..

At the moment neither is the “ultimate search engine” that their makers would like for them to be, though that does not stop them from advertising them as being so… What follows is a brief and accurate guide/overview of how to use them both to your benefit, where each excels, and where they fall short.. There is no rambling introduction, no circumventing points, and no conclusion. Just plain hard facts.

MSN Search’s No. 1 listing is usually the one you want; so if you are looking for a website or a company or a product, use MSN. But if you are shopping for info, browsing the web, etc. you need Google…. Because Google’s results are sorted by “Backlinks” its relevance level for each site comes up based on the number of links that other people linked to this site with this keyword..

For example, there are 98 sites linking to your site in an < a > tag with text “Joe’s Blog,” but your site is called “Smith’s Blog” and has nothing to do with Joe… Google does not care, you will be number 1 on their search rankings (obviously provided that no one has more backlinks than yourself). Google does NOT read meta data (except for frequency, language, content, and robots definitions), it ignores keywords and description tags.

By contrast, MSN Search reads Keywords and Description tags and sorts sites by relevancy based on cached content only. MSN Search is excellent (read: unbeatable) for new sites, ergo good for the fast paced online world of day-and-night technologies; while Google boasts its (excellent and very large) database of more-or-less popular and dependable links…

In the end Google has less spam, MSN has more. Google has more content, MSN has less. MSN updates its cache faster, MSN gives newbies and their sites a bigger, more fair chance, while Google is a researchers best friend. ;)