MARKETING: Microsoft's New Search Engine by Robert K. McCourty

I tried out Microsoft's new search engine (beta version) other day. They have been working on it quite secretly now for almost a year. It has been rumored to be a Google killer once in full public release. They say its accuracy and ability to return relevant results will far surpass any other search engine on Internet. That remains to be seen. I tried various combinations of single, double, and triple word/phrased searches to inspect results.

To casual observer I suppose a certain percentage of results would seem to be accurate, but upon closer inspection and with a trained eye, results for most part ranged from poor to outright terrible.

I then attempted a series of searches on same combination of words. "custom designed screen printed t-shirts" I was attempting to determine how much results and rankings changed (or did not change) within same set of query words. I searched with a variety of spellings on a particular keyword In this case, I selected word "T shirts" then t-shirts (with a dash) and finally "tshirts" (no dash, all one word)

One web site had very consistent results across all three spelling methods. This intrigued me so I clicked on link to analyze site. i.e. Why was this one so well optimized or more specifically why did this new Microsoft beta search engine find this web site so tasty.

The site was completely broken. None of graphics loaded properly. (in Internet Explorer) It was devoid of any contextual content on home page and scarcely little throughout rest of pages. Some scrolling Java script overlapped button for a drop down menu. No outside links. Nothing. Excuse pun but this was not a pretty site. How then could Microsoft possibly rank this site one, two and three for completely different keyword phrasings and spellings on a soon to be major release for a search engine?

The answer revealed itself as soon as I took a look at web site's HTML source code.

Guess what folks, meta tags are back! At least as far as Beta version of Microsoft's new search engine is concerned, especially keyword Meta Tag. Above all, this tag seemed to account for heaviest weight in determining aforementioned rankings. I will err on side of caution here and assume that Microsoft has not finalized all their algorithm parameters yet, but keyword tag was definitely what their spider had been eating.

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