Lots of chatter over MSN’s ill-fated test, where they prefilled the search box with sponsored keywords. Search Engine Land summarizes the story, and the feedback MSN got, which apparently was extremely negative.
The best part about the SEL post is the comment by Philipp Lenssen: “If you need user feedback and click statistics to figure out this is a bad idea, you’re seriously in trouble as a search engine, because your team misses certain people with a good common sense understanding of the web.”
That about sums it up. I’ve commented in several places, including on this blog, about MSN’s foibles with adCenter and PPC in general. They just don’t seem to get it when it comes to search and PPC. I’m not even sure they listen to their users, even though they say they do. It takes them so long to make fixes and improvements to adCenter, I wonder if they really believe what we say. Or are they just so big and bureaucratic that it takes forever to make simple changes? Or both?
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