Nick Garner's Blog

Google created a superb service by being engineering driven. it also understood the power of influencers – the likes of you and me (ordinary poeple dont read blogs generally) who raved about it and made sure when ever they were asked to fix a PC, Google would become the default page of IE

And of course we would always be asked our opinion and most tech users will always say google.
Aside: to those of you in internet marketing, you will know that the MSN search demographic is better converting and more non-internet savvy than traffic from google. I believe its because they cant tell the difference between natural search results and paid for ones.

So what if MSN live began doing stuff which impresses the influencers? Stuff like being able to hack the search box when you embed it onto your web page:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa905322.aspx??

______________

or the new operator LinkFromDomain

See it here:?? LinkFromDomain

Syntax
Green???? LinkDomain:YourSite.com
Yellow???? LinkFromDomain:YourSite.com
Blue???? Either LinkDomain or LinkFromDomain
Green + Yellow + Blue
LinkFromDomain:YourSite.com | LinkDomain:YourSite.com

See diagram:

Or MSN AdLab keyword cluster tool
Interesting tool which shows you how MSN clusters keywords. If you a google centric SEO person (most are) then you could try using the google equivalent of typing the ???~??? berefore a keyword i.e. ~sep , ~seo and so on in the search box.http://adlab.msn.com/src/

other MSN tools:- Demographic Prediction Tool - predicts the demographics of searchers by keyword or site visitors by website

Online Commercial Intention Detection Tool – estimates the probability of a search query or web page being commercial, informational-transactional.

http://adlab.msn.com/searchfunnel/ How users search before and after a given search query

There is just a ton of geekery here and I do think there will be a tipping point when microsoft turn from being seen as evil, to being the good guys and when MSN Live becomes both the geek ( influencers ) and dumb end users favourite.

The outlook isnt great on the market growth numbers for MSN, but remember when the tipping point, tips it will spread like wild fire. My guess is that this time will come in about 3 years.

Related posts:

1. MSN Search Funnel
2. Word clusters and SEO theme
3. SEO Tools