Microsoft Live Search One Box?
As part of my normal routine I do a lot of research at Commerce360, today was no different, and I was doing some research with Microsoft's Live Search (or MSN Search). I came across something that made me go "hmmmm" I haven't seen this before. I did a little scouring of the blogosphere and the other search engines to see if anyone else had seen this yet.
Microsoft's Live Search seems to be putting up a "one box", very similar to Google's one box. There are some differences of course, like Microsoft is asking for feedback with a "did this help" sort of link. Take a look at the results I got for "women's clothes", "pda", "movies", & "TV shows".
I tried to find anyone who has reported on this before, but couldn't find any instances. Has anyone seen this recently? This is an interesting development, in light of the market share slippage that Microsoft has been seeing.
The one box listings are from shopping.msn.com listings for the product listings, however, I didn't catch where the movies link was taking users (although I suspect it takes you to the Movies Section of MSN.. I came home from work and I can't reproduce the movies one box that I did at the office, but you can clearly see it in the screen cap above. If you click on the "Is This Useful" link, you are taken to a "Windows Live Search Answers" feedback form. I'm not sure if that's correct, since this isn't really an "Answers" issue, perhaps they are reusing the form?
If Microsoft is now incorporating their own box features, this is something search marketers should be paying attention too, and perhaps give serious consideration to submitting clients retail products to the MSN Shopping feed. Just like the Google Base/Froogle product feeds the one box area on Google, it seems to be the MSN Shopping is feeding this one box on Live.com.
Yeah, nice eye on spotting that. I have been waiting for others to catch on since I posted about it on my blog.
http://www.ecommerceoptimization.com/articles/livecom-adds-products-onebox-looking-more-like-google/
Was this posted back in January? Or did you just time stamp that yourself? I have been monitoring these results and this is the first I saw your post. I know they tested this awhile back, but I haven't seen it until recently on mass search results (mostly for product specific queries).
Posted by: eCopt | June 18, 2007 at 12:42 PM
Actually I really did post this back in January when I first caught it coming up. So this has been happening on Live and MSN search for a while now. :)
Posted by: Li Evans | June 19, 2007 at 09:06 AM