msn.co.uk - goodbye excite, hello yell ?

[markymark]

Unlike its .com counterpart, msn.co.uk allows you to search two other search engines/directories. Traditionally, these have been ukplus and excite.co.uk. In fact, there was a period when excite was the default search from msn.co.uk.

No longer -excite is now not even an option. It has been replaced by yell.com - the Yellow Pages. It is true that these other options have never been much used, but there was always a worthwhile trickle of traffic coming from excite via msn. The Yell.com search option looks only for Yellow Pages category titles, so if your business does not match a category title, then you have no chance on picking up on this extra traffic.

US readers of this thread will probably be thinking - so what ? But UK surfers are (still) very web naive and if their main (msn.co.uk) search doesn't bring up the results they want, they are more likely to try one of these other search options than to go elsewhere to search.

Apart from the fact that this devalues the search experience at msn.co.uk; it looks like another nail in the coffin for Excite.

[ihelpyou]

Good info! I did not know that Excite was MSN in UK. yell.com?? That is ridiculous.

[MsSearch]

even us USA'ers use UK and other engine info...I've been collecting info on the UK engines and directories and which ones to submit to and which ones are affiliated with each other, etc...

so all info is useful....may be useful to different people for different reasons....but it IS useful

Thanx...:up:

[markymark]

MsSearch - please change your avatar. I can't concentrate with that cute little face blowing kisses at me all the time. ;) I didn't intend to imply that this info would be of no use to US SEOs - more that the way UK surfers (in general) search does not match that of their US counterparts. This is important when trying to optimise for UK search engines, as things like Ask.co.uk and freeserve.com have a disproportionate influence.

Indeed, it was only last weekend that I finally got my parents to understand that they could search on engines other than MSN (their ISP). This despite the fact that one son is in SEO and the other works for Microsoft. Gotta love em tho'.

[ihelpyou]

Microsoft? Tell him to stick a huge bug into the programming of the smart tags. Something that no one will ever fix. :D

[markymark]

Just noticed that when you go to msn.co.uk sometimes the search default is yell.com, not msn. When did this start happening ? Secondly, BT Internet has started re-directing to msn.co.uk if you try to go to msn.com.

This is odd as BT Internet usually refresh caches and so on faster than their competitors and don't always redirect other .coms to their UK equivalent.