I am Pleading With You Microsoft: PLEASE Make Live Search Better

That’s right. I am officially pleading with Microsoft.


Microsoft, we all NEED you to get better. There is too much competition within your bowels amongst the blackhats, and you are simply a source of confusion or ignorance for many whitehats. And right now, you don’t get enough searches to satisfy either. Right now, as the debate about Yahoo’s fate rages on, we need you to step up and improve yourself, so that Yahoo will see you as a fit candidate to keep it from falling into Google’s flesh tearing hands.



I have compiled here a list of why you suck. Please, read it, and use some of those billions of dollars to make it better.

I know there are lots of brilliant people who work there. I’ve had the privilege of talking to several of them.

So what is holding them back? Whatever it is, make it go away.



Please Fix These Things:



I’m Sorry Microsoft, but Your PPC Program is on a Downward Spiral to Hell

Let’s first make sure that no one forgets that the income(and worth) of any search engine is their pay per click program. That is how they make their money, and is of fundamental importance.

AdCenter has a reputation for cheap arse clicks, and users that may as well have their credit card number tattooed onto their forehead. They are the bottom 5% of search engine users; those who could not change the default search, or download firefox.

So that’s good for marketers and SEOs, yes? Agreed. However, there’s several problems. And they are massive problems.



Your Ajax Makes my Computer Run Like a Graphing Calculator - Seriously. I can understand the “remember me” box on AdCenter almost never working as a kind of oversight. But if you’re going to do that, PLEASE make it so the Ajax takes less time to load, than it does to friggin time out of my session. I change tabs sometimes, I’ll admit it. But when I see that it’s no longer loading my fingers must move like lightning. God forbid I’m in the bathroom or something, because then I’m gonna have to start all over again. And it is painful.

Your “Relevancy Bot” Sucks - I can hardly bring myself to create decent targeted campaigns anymore on AdCenter, knowing that my carefully constructed adgroups that took hours to make and remake courtesy of the previous rant about ajaxy crappiness will all be completely disabled before they even get a chance to run. If I bid on “circular widgets”, and send people to my page about “round widget” I can almost guarantee people will not feel cheated out of that second of their life. You do not have to disable it because the keyword “round” was not found on that page, or because “widget” is not plural. Or at the very least, if you’re going to disable keywords based on that, do me a favor and do it reliably so that I can know what to expect. Don’t leave 3 keywords out of my 800 active.

Your Own Tech Support Tells Us to Keyword Stuff at The Bottom of the Page! Do you realize how messed up that is?

Your Keyword Recommendations Suck - You have an insane amount of user data. What people searched for vs. what they clicked in the results for example. If I tell you to extract possible keyphrases from a website(how else would I avoid getting my campaign deactivated for relevancy?). I mean, this would be fine. Most people wouldn’t use that tool anyways. Except that you deactivate campaigns so much, we HAVE TO unless we want to make an entirely different domain/lander for MSN vs. Google and other places that would penalize for that activity.

Let’s take a look at MSN’s Top 10 relevant keyword reccomendations if you tell it to look at SlightlyShadySEO.com



job

es

blog

guess

checks

server

limited

pdf

mini

poll

Are you kidding me?

Please, for the love of God. Get Better at Detecting Cloaking - Sound weird coming from someone with admittedly blackhat tendencies? Yeah. But right now it’s SO easy to game MSN that there’s just too much competition for blackhats. Knock out the bottom tier of them. Until you do that, there won’t even be enough of a user base to be worth gaming! Hopefully by cutting out some of the competition there can be enough people using it to warrant real attempts at gaming Live Search.

Have some pride! Stop being the consolation prize people get when they’re banned from Google.



Please, Learn to Use a Robots.txt - Your site has so many areas that should not be being crawled that it’s insane. Your search engine is being gamed worse than a blind casino employee working the roulette wheel.

A Search Engine is More Complicated than CTRL+F in Notepad- This is a big point. Right now, the formula for ranking in live search is simple.

Step 1: Put desired text on page.

Step 2: Get lots of crappy links with that exact anchor text. When I say crappy, I mean crappy. Links that would get you penalized anywhere else.

Step 3: Profit! (3 clicks per day at a time. If you ranked for a short tail phrase)

Ok. Are we even pretending there’s more to it? Because there’s really not. Try normal linking patterns. Try “bad neighorhoods”.

Please, Pay Your AdCenter Tech Support More - They’re honestly some of the best tech support I’ve ever talked to. A bit slow due to what appears to be a tremendous bureaucracy, but still God bless their souls they keep trying. Lesser men and women would’ve long hurled themselves off a 10th story window, but they keep on trucking.

It’s no wonder Yahoo doesn’t want to be acquired. They’ve got many of the same problems. If not all of them. Do me a favor though? If you do, at least don’t take their content network with you. That’s the one part that’s still alive and kicking. Don’t let Yahoo kill it.



With that, I’m off to reload AdCenter and start crying in the fetal position.

-XMCP