Information: This site now serves as an archive for my plugins.
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Windows Live search: No longer indexing Google ads

Posted by multippt

 Fancy your ads appearing in a search engine?

Whew, sounds like Microsoft didn’t anticipate that it’s own crawler will be indexing Google AdWords ads. And no, don’t get the idea that it will help just because your ad link “gets more exposure” (oh wait, it does help). It’s pretty interesting to note that even those ads can rank up fairly well for certain terms.

The problem is this: In an attempt to increase the relevancy of the search results, Live search now includes links pointing towards pages blocked by even robot.txt files (well, it only told it to not crawl the page, but didn’t tell it to not count the stuff inside the links pointing to the page). Again, it shows that Microsoft ain’t following the robot rules completely, because those ads are only present in Google search results, which are disallowed to be indexed by the robot.txt file. Let’s hope other ads won’t pop up as well. Though, this wasn’t the first time it has happened before… :)

Well, at least those ads stopped appearing in the results for now.

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Google, Yahoo,… what about Windows Live?

Posted by multippt

Google and Yahoo has always remained in the big picture. However, there is one big giant standing in the shadows. Windows Live is probably much better compared to its older precursor, MSN search, and is possibly comparable to the 2 top giants.

Though, Windows Live was not as well-known compared to Google and Yahoo. Rather than word-of-mouth, Microsoft decided to incorporate it into Internet Explorer 7 as the default search engine, which probably did not work as well as compared to Internet Explorer dominance in 2002.

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Windows Live Hotmail?

Posted by multippt

 Windows Live Hotmail

Hmm… here’s something I’ve never noticed before… Windows Live Hotmail. This version of Hotmail is still in beta [probably was made available since Feburary earlier this year].

What’s so different from the original Hotmail?
First of all, it has a nice disk space of 2 GB [Hotmail plus members get this amount as well], 1 GB up from the original Hotmail. It also dons a nicer look [similar to Office 2007], plus allows you to change the theme. It claims to have increased security as well.

If you have a relatively old account, you can upgrade your account at the Windows Live Hotmail page. Some user accounts have already been upgraded automatically.