New Look In July, New Search Engine Later, Says MSN
New Look In July, New Search Engine Later, Says MSN: "MSN announced a redesign for its MSN Search service last week, a cosmetic change that helps the service comply with US Federal Trade Commission recommendations about labeling paid placement results.The change being implemented on July 1 will not coincide with the launch of MSN's own search technology. A crawler-based MSN search engine has been in development since last year, but there remains no announced launch date for this.
In particular, there will be two Sponsored Sites areas. One is a box at the top of the search page, giving ads "inline" placement. The other ads will run along the right-hand side of the screen Google-style, in what Search Engine Watch calls "sidebar" placement and what MSN refers to as the "right rail." In both cases, a "Sponsored Sites" heading is clearly displayed.
The main listings on MSN Search's results page -- those under the "Web Pages" heading -- currently come from Yahoo. These are mixture of pages found by Yahoo's crawling of the web and content obtained through Yahoo's content acquisition program, some of which involves paid inclusion.
After the July change, the main listings at MSN will continue to come from Yahoo. They simply will no longer have a "Web Pages" heading coming above them.
At some point in the future, MSN expects to replace this data with that found by its own crawler. As previously said, this won't happen in July. Instead, it's more likely to happen toward the end of the year.
FTC recommendations: As long as paid inclusion doesn't provide a ranking boost -- which MSN supplier Yahoo says is the case -- paid inclusion need only be disclosed via a search engine's help pages."
posted by Jen @ 6:58 AM
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