MSN LIVE Gaming Searchers?

I just read this great piece at GigaOm that explains how MSN LIVE has been able to register the gains that it has reported in its search volumes recently. Looks like some executives at Microsoft have come up with some nifty strategies to shoot automated queries based on user actions in their newly launched LIVE Search Club.

According to Hitwise, Microsoft’s share of US searches shot up from 8.46% to 9.85%. That’s a nice little jump. The big question is if these gains are legitimate or this a case akin to Barry Bonds’ pending claim to the home run record, where a promotional offer may have juiced up the search share. The answer is the latter.

We checked with Hitwise, and they explained that June gains include “searches automatically generated from a promotion on club.live.com,” up to June 9, 2007. After that they stopped counting the data.

Seems like MSN LIVE is throwing up search results just to boost up its search volumes. A further research of the LIVE Search Club by Om confirmed his theory!

I spent sometime on club.live.com and realized that Hitwise was being kind. I ended up playing Chicktionary, a word game, which is “powered by Live Search.” Every time you put together a word, the bottom half of the screen produced a page of search results related to that word. I didn’t ask for them – they just showed up. It wasn’t bots that were throwing up those pages. Instead, it was Microsoft showing them to me. When you hit hint, you get some search results that are supposed to be clues.

Shame on MSN!

They can't fight a fair war with Google so they resort to trickery! Too bad.
Google is indeed the king amongst the search engines. No number of Yahoo and MSN put together can even come closer.

What do you say, guys? :-)


Tags: Google, MSN LIVE, Search Engine, LIVE Search Club, MSN, Yahoo, Technology, Business, GigaOm