Last month I ranted about some serious problems with search results for popular navigational queries on Microsoft Live Search.

Dan Sharp commented that he’d written about the same issues at the start of the year.

Within two weeks, Microsoft’s SEM-evangelist-at-large, Mel Carson, asked me to check again. And lo, the problems were fixed.

It’s a shame that Microsoft let these problems go on for so long, but full marks to them responding to my criticisms so quickly.

I got sent a link for Big Snap 2, Microsoft's latest promotion to get people to use Live Search. But let me tell you, they could give a Ferrari to every user and it still wouldn't get people to switch from Google.

Why? Because the most basic relevance for some incredibly popular terms is still awful. Let me give two examples:

1. Facebook: The first result for this search is… wait for it… Amicus: the trade union! How can that possibly be right? The Facebook homepage is down as position 6. Total crap.
2. Myspace: The top result for this is web-date.co.uk, a site that's got more spam in it than a Monty Python convention. The Myspace homepage languishes at postion 5. Garbage.

According to Hitwise, Facebook is the #1 search term in the UK; Myspace is #7. How many users are disappointed everyday on Live Search because of this?

Oh mighty gods of Microsoft, please, please, please get this right. Screw your algorithm, hand write these results.

I so want you to do well, as do many others in the SEM community. It's so incredibly important. Then I'll try to win a few John Lewis vouchers.

There’s a great article on Clickz by Eric Picard called ‘Ad Exchanges Are the Future‘. Eric works for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. He has written a very clear description of what’s wrong with the current trading practices in media buying (outside of search) and how that’s going to change in the next 5 to 10 years.

The opening paragraph of his article states:

Advertising is one of the last significant business markets that remains opaque, manual, archaically complex, and requires a large relatively skilled set of humans to perform each transaction. It’s a market ripe to embrace technology for automation, liquidity of inventory, pricing transparency, and simplification of business process.

Extremely well put.

On Thursday I was the guest of Microsoft at their adChamps event. Around 40 advertisers and agencies, large and small were invited to a full day with their engineers, researchers and executives. Microsoft have a lot of challenges in Europe and all credit to them for sharing their plans and visions for the adCenter platform. They invited feedback; they received it in spades.

I won’t go into detail about the day (and in fact an NDA prevents me from doing so) but it’s enough to say that Microsoft has some big plans for the online advertising market and the next few years will be extremely interesting. It was fascinating to meet people like Tarek Najm and it was extremely well organised and hosted by Mel Carson, AKA AdCenterEU.

The day was rounded off by dinner at the Mint Leaf restaurant on Haymarket. I stumbled out at about 12.30am; around an hour later some people tried to blow up the whole street.

Update

Microsoft generously gave everyone who attended a goodie bag which contained either Vista or Office 2007.  I chose the latter and installed it yesterday.  It’s a significant improvement on Office 2003.