Archive for the ‘MSN’ Category

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced they are joining Google in their support for the XML sitemaps protocol. All three engines will be upgrading to version 0.90.

I don’t personally use Google sitemaps often. I prefer to create a website that search engines love and let Google find the pages on their own. My method is a great way to determine whether a sites has been properly structured by watching how it is indexed by Google and others.

Yahoo is on the same level as Google and has no problem indexing all of my pages when a site is designed properly.

MSN Live Search on the other hand is horrible. This may be a godsend for people wanting to be completely indexed by MSN. It will be interesting to see if MSN actually indexes every page included in a sitemap or if they ignore half of them like they currently do when indexing a website.

Looks like MSN Live Search is having some issues. My searches are returning either zero results or just one result. Since Live Search tells me there are zero results for both the words “home” and “robots”, I must assume someone is erasing the Internet. Here are some screen shots.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/98687953@N00/sets/72157594363755195/show/

Anyone else seeing the same thing?

p.s. I’m new to using Flickr, so if anyone knows where the docs on how to embed these slide shows into my page, please let me know. I’m not finding it.

MSN has given us access to a new search operator LinkFromDomain as Oilman first posted. Example: LinkFromDomain:Xuru.com

Results seem pretty stale overall. If MSN would spend some time indexing something other than blogspot blogs, maybe they could update the rest of the web more often.

That said, this is an amazing new feature to add to your research tool set. Being able to compare incoming vs. outgoing linking patterns should prove for some interesting data. Ok where did I put the phone number to my local programmer.