With the sheer number of search engines vying for the upper echelon in the word of search, one thing still reigns supreme besides Google. The fact that Yahoo and MSN have had to up their game to keep the competition at bay and keep the algorithms fine tuned to produce relevant results. With fickle users willing to jump ship in a moments notice, in order to remain synonymous with the title of being in the top 3 search engines, it’s all about what happens after you click search after typing a query. Miss the mark and that’s one less patron to think about, as users are driven ultimately by relevance.
Yahoo is met with mixed results and MSN (Microsoft Network Live Search) was in the opinion of most on it’s way out, with the number of users opting out to find other engines like ASK.com and other up and coming engines for finding websites of interest.
Microsoft determined to up the ante struck back with a true search engine worthy of praise. The ranking algorithm closely resembles Google in the sense that the results are far from mis-mashed-gobbly-gook, as Live Search (in our summation) relies heavily on off page optimization (back links) to award relevant search results. Great for SEO companies who offer SEO services to clients, but, not so great for websites and businesses who rely strictly on, on page optimization alone.
Although it is too early to tell, for the most part, Live Search is being met with favorable reviews, but if I had to give it a thumbs up vs. thumbs down, I would have to give it two thumbs way up. Keep up the good work, since you already have market share, nothing like a touch of innovation to stir things up a bit.
