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?
- job
- 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
April 12th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
off-topic so please delete after you read it: i saw your twitter about affiliate marketers in/near michigan and wanted to talk to you about it but you’re not following me. could you either follow ryankauffman or email me at ryan (a) stcmediapartnersdotcom
April 12th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
While I think there is room for improvement, especially in the usability of that crappy ajax system, I disagree with you on some other points. I think Microsoft has the best developed system for the PPC ads, especially when it comes to keyword research. Check out microsoft adlabs and tell me if anyone else can beat that kind of demographic data. Nobody can.
April 12th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
@Nick: You think that’s getting pulled from Facebook yet? Or still outa hotmail? Cuz I know on hotmail I’m a 98 year old (probably 105 by now) hairy old bastard living in the Caribbean. (No, that’s not my retirement plan
.)
@X: Frikkin hilarious post dude!
BTW, stumbled.
April 13th, 2008 at 2:28 am
@gab: go check out adlabs and you’ll see what i mean man.
April 13th, 2008 at 3:10 am
@NickyCakes: Adlabs is nice I guess. But you can put frosting on a shit cake, and it’s still made of shit.
April 13th, 2008 at 4:01 am
Let me add a little something:
- Wanna make more money? Start thinking internationally! It’s incredible how far back we are over here in Europa when it comes to Adcenter/Live functionality. No wonder Google has a 94% market share.
April 13th, 2008 at 4:14 am
If “live” finally died, maybe something really live might replace it? For several years I ranked #1 for a generic 2 word travel term on msn. Made about $5 a month. “Live” can’t figure out redirects, incoming links, anything? Please go away.
April 13th, 2008 at 7:46 am
I fall in a different category than most people, in fact two. I am a former Microsft employee and I live in France.
MS will not make live better because it actually works to the specs that were laid out. the way MA products are developed leave little room for improvement, just ebcause it does not work.
My special case about being in France sucx hard and I can not use live search unless I am searching in French. ANY search done outside the US uses the data base of the country of origin. This means that I look for online “chat” and will find loads about cats since the french word for cat is chat. I have changed every default and can not make it work. To the point that I have receive an email from Balmer and from a Gates PA when I wrote out the entire issue. The official reply was “call the help desk”.
I joined MS in 99 and was there for alpha and beta testing of a lot of software. I am still running IE8, hoping to give enough feedback so it does not suc as hard as IE7.
During my early beta testing I found that in Outlook, my subject line was changed to the French language, so I had to spell check every mail sent and say the words were correctly written. My OS was US English. Outlook was US English, all defaults were US English, but I had a French keyboard.
I submitted an issue report for Win98. W2k. WME and every version of windows that came along on any format up to and including Vista, and each time was told that it would be considered in the next version.
Sorry, your request is valid but there is no reason to consider making Live Search better until the next version.
April 13th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
“Check out microsoft adlabs and tell me if anyone else can beat that kind of demographic data. Nobody can.”
The validity of this tool has been called into question numerous times. And there’s nothing to really cross reference it with, so Microsoft has a typical monopoly formula where there’s no alternative, so people assume it is good. But it’s like doing anything else, if you’re doing keyword research, you’re not just going to assume that Wordze is accurate for that keyword. You cross reference with at least 1 other keyword tool. You can’t do that with adlabs.
I think like most of Microsoft’s products, it will one day be replaced by something better (and the adlabs will be shown to be a crock for the most part).
April 13th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
The worst part about them, to me, is the relevancy bot. It’s a total joke. How could a company with so much cash suck so badly??
April 14th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Microsoft, come on, get it together. There’s room for another quality engine. You won’t be number one but there’s still a need and want for you to get better. Please Live, heed the call to get better!
April 14th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Completely agree about AdCenter support, they try so hard to work with an interface that is so awful. The amount of time one has to pour into AdCenter to get anything out of it is grueling. I asked once if they could tell me where on the Content/Partner network my ads were being placed and they couldn’t. What the hell is that? You can assure me that they’re showing on a relevant page all you want, but I want to know WHAT page! Especially when all of a sudden it drives 200k impressions overnight, more than the monthly average.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
You read my mind.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:03 am
[...] Read more I am Pleading With You Microsoft: PLEASE Make Live Search Better : Slightly Shady SEO [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Mike this is hilarious! AdCenter is a steaming pile of cat shit. It’s sooooo slow it makes my life frustrating as an internet marketer.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Shady, I have been editing Wikipedia for 9 months now. Recently I have been blocked and now undergoing mediation process on my talk page. If you want to see the inner working of Wikipedia I welcome you to come take a look at Wikipedia.
I think it will be a very interesting experience and will shed some light on the Dark Side of Wikipedia.
If you or your guest have advice as to Wikipedia and would like to share it with me and the other guests of my blog please post it on my blog.
http://www.igorthetroll.com/blog/wikipedia-igorberger-mediation/
Thank you,
Igor
April 21st, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Here here! This post is spot on. AdCenter IS a shit cake and is one of the most frustrating pieces of crap online.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Interesting article and although live search has improved it still has a way to go. I found this article when i entered ‘live search sucks’ into live search. This article ranked at the top. What is even funnier is when I enter the same into google.com the results aren’t as well ranked (with articles from way back in 2006) coming up. Try it for yourself.
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