August 1, 2006

MSN Assigns Names To Vertical Search Crawlers

I covered news at my blog this morning that MSN has assigned names to all their robots or crawlers. When MSN Search first launched, they had one robot named, msnbot. MSNbot did the work of all, from normal web search to image search to news and images. Now, MSN has clarified the roles and assigned names to each robot.

The MSN Shopping bot is msnbot-products, the MSN News bot is msnbot-news, the MSN Image Search bot is msnbot-media and the MSN Search bot is still msnbot. This is important for SEOs, now you can define in your robots.txt file if you want msnbot-media to index your images or not.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:53 AM | Permalink

May 24, 2006

Microsoft Talks Shopping

Last week I briefly introduced three of Microsoft's e-commerce initiatives: MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping, and Windows Live Product Search. This week I talked with Jim Barr, GM of Microsoft's Shopping and Marketplaces group for a little more insight.

Here's an excerpt: Search is very important. Half of the shopping starts in search. 15-25% of all searches go to a shopping site. MSN search will not win unless we are good at commerce search. Thats a strong reason why we invested.

Windows Live Product Search goes on the presumption that the audience wants to see as much selection as possible. We crawl the web for everything out there. Were starting with a philosophy that people should be able to search for tail items.

Eventually we want to apply as many ways to go from a long list of whats available to a short list of whats right for you. We have our goals in mind [to match buyers and sellers] and we want to do whats right for users.

May 19, 2006

Guide To Microsoft's Many Shopping Search Sites

This is a long overdue post to clear up confusion around Microsoft's multiple shopping sites which include MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping Beta, and Windows Live Product Search Beta. The Marketplaces & Shopping team at Microsoft also runs Windows Marketplace and Windows Live Expo but in this post, I'm just covering the general ecommerce initiatives.

MSN Shopping = Microsoft's core shopping comparison engine. MSN Shopping covers over 7,000 merchants and 33 million products. The beauty of a shopping comparison engine like MSN Shopping is in its ability to normalize product pages - put simply, item clustering (I'm borrowing that term from Imran Aziz, Lead Program Manager Windows Live Product Search Beta), the ability to put all merchant offers for a particular product on a single page. MSN Shopping works off of very structured product data provided by Shopping.com and PriceGrabber.

Windows Live Shopping = The Web 2.0 version of MSN Shopping. Windows Live Shopping does not work with FireFox, although that will be taken care of soon. As MSN Shopping Program Manager Ian McAllister wrote on his blog, "[this] was arguably the first experience within the Shopping team in developing a truly loosely-coupled service. It prompted what you might call a services tidal wave within our team that pre-dated Ray Ozzie's mail by a few months. Literally three-quarters of the development team went off and worked on a host of different services using the agile method and for the most part, operating independently of the other teams. The cornerstone of our web service platform is the set of core shopping web services that expose the product catalog, attribute refinements, compare and other functionality. Other services include ratings & reviews, wish list and guides."

This is an incredible improvement over MSN Shopping. Great user interface, cool features and tools. Windows Live Shopping really puts the consumer first and is an exciting example of the new types of services Microsoft is developing

Windows Live Product Search = Microsoft's shopping search engine. A shopping search engine differs from a shopping comparison engine in that it does not depend on merchants submitting data feeds, but rather crawls the web for merchants. Because of this, Windows Live Product Search covers over 100,000 merchants (a lot more than the 7,000 or so covered on MSN Shopping and Windows Live Shopping). A comprehensive experience is a great start, but I think we're too early in the game to understand the implication of this new search offering.

While there are obviously big improvements in comprehensiveness, Windows Live Product Search users will notice that there aren't normalized product pages (item clustering) in the traditional shopping comparison engine sense and merchant reveiws are a no show. According to the Product Search blog, though, these features are on the way.

Posted by Brian Smith at 2:55 PM | Permalink

May 1, 2006

Microsoft Launches Windows Live Shopping Beta

Microsoft announced Friday that they have launched Windows Live Shopping in beta, it only works on Internet Explorer for Windows. It runs on AJAX, making it Web 2.0 :), but you can drag and drop, share items with "friends," and review and create reviews.

Conducting a search on lcd tv brought up a very nice interface. Since I just bought one for my new home, I wanted to see what they had to offer. You can quickly (well, it doesn't run too quickly) narrow your search by screen size, aspect ratio, price range, brand and seller, all excellent filter options. After you filter your search, you can then sort by "best match," "popularity," "price," and "rating." In addition, they have this little slider where you can change the search results display from list view with or without pictures or simply picture view. You can also add products to your "shopping list" or to "compare list." They also have all the standards you would expect from a shopping search engine.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:59 AM | Permalink

December 17, 2005

New Look for MSN Shopping Price Comparison Pages

MSN Shopping has been mentioned in several posts over the past few months.

Yesterday, Mike Gordon, Lead Product Manager, blogged about enhancements to price information pages and a some minor tweaks to the user interface.

Gordon writes: This page allows MSN Shopping customers to compare all the offers for standard products like consumer electronics, books and movies. Instead of sorting offers purely by price, the page now sorts offers by condition first, then price. Offers for new items are listed first, sorted by price; then refurbished items, sorted by price; then used items, sorted by price; and lastly, items where the seller did not specify condition.

Our consumer testing shows that most MSN Shopping users prefer to shop for new goods, though many are interested in being able to compare prices for refurbished and used items as well. They can do both on our new page, without having to check a separate page for refurbished or used items, as many of our competitors require.

Recent posts about MSN Shopping include: + Millions of eBay Items Now Searchable on MSN Shopping + MSN Shopping Receives Upgrade Down Under + MSN Shopping Adds Search Refinements for Hundreds of Product Categories

Posted by Gary Price at 4:32 PM | Permalink

December 3, 2005

Millions of eBay Items Now Searchable on MSN Shopping

Just in time for the holiday shopping season and interesting move from MS. You can now search MSN Shopping and find items up for auction or for sale on eBay and still get access to many of the refinements available on the actual eBay site.

The MSN Shopping Insider blog reports that items listed on eBay are now directly searchable via MSN Shopping. According to the post, you'll find both auction items and fixed priced items ready for immediate sale.

From the blog post: Inventory on eBay is constantly changing and in order to bring our consumers the freshest catalog of choices possible, we parse, load, classify and match the tens of millions of eBay items on a daily basis. We have invested in building out our software platform to handle such high churn workloads and have expanded our server infrastructure to efficiently and quickly ingest the inventory available on eBay, along with the catalogs of our existing merchants and aggregators. All told, we sift through hundreds of millions of items every day.

The post goes on to mention that along with the actual items, search refinements such as "auction sort" and the ability to see the number of auctions available for a specific item. The blog post has a screen cap.

Here's another MSN/eBay search. Item details provided on an MSN Shopping page. After clicking on the desired item the searcher is then sent to the specific item entry on the eBay site.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:21 AM | Permalink

November 18, 2005

New MSN Search "Fast Answer" Offers Results from MSN Shopping on Web Results Pages

MSN Search has added a new "fast answer" feature that provides results direct from MSN Shopping at the top of web search results pages.

To trigger these results, search for a product category or the brand name and the product category. For example, this search for Nikon Digital Camera offers a direct answer from MSN Shopping with direct links to product pages for the top three results. This "fast answer" also shows user ratings, megapixel info, and pricing data.

Here's another example search, this time a search for Sony Televisions.

Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves also provide direct results from their shopping databases at the top of web results pages if the query is shopping/product based and/or uses the correct trigger terms.

More MSN Search "Fast Answers" are listed here.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:36 PM | Permalink

October 22, 2005

MSN Shopping Receives Upgrade Down Under

A post on the MSN Shopping Insider Blog points out that the shopping database on ninemsn, MSN's site in Australia, has been retooled and is now live. The Australian shopping site is utilizing the same platform that's in use on the U.S. site. According to the post, ninemsn Shopping is home to 200,000 products from more than 200 retailers. An intro to the new site is available here.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:16 AM | Permalink

October 16, 2005

MSN Shopping Search Now Available on Start.com Portal

If you follow shopping search and/or personalized portal scene closely, you might be interested to learn that MS's "incubation experiment" Start.com has just added a module (what they call a "gadget") for MSN Shopping. MSN Shopping's Cristina Colby has more including a screen cap on the MSN Shopping Insider blog.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:47 PM | Permalink

September 29, 2005

MSN Shopping Adds Search Refinements for Hundreds of Product Categories

Just up on the MSN Shopping Insider is a post about some new and useful features that have gone live at MSN Shopping. Now, it's possible to focus and refine a shopping search using attributes that are specific to the product category your searching in. This has been possible with MSN Shopping in the past with categories like televisions and computers but as of today these types of refinements are available in more than 300 categories. For example, if you're searching for flowers, you can now focus your flower search by type (roses, lillies, etc), arrangement type (bouquet, vase, planter, etc.) flower color, and seller. Of course, you can also focus by price range. If you're searching for a diamonds, you can refine by color, carat, clarity, cut and price. Little to no learning curve to use these refinements. A good example of keeping it simple.

I didn't check all 300 categories (-:, but I did look at other shopping engines to see what refinements they offer shopping for diamonds.

+ Shopzilla also allows to refine by stone shape, carat, cut, color, clarity, and price range. + Shopping.com allows a searcher to refine a search for diamonds by clarity, carat, and price. Very similar to MSN Shopping. + PriceGrabber offers a carat refinement. + Yahoo Shopping, refine by price. + Become.com, refine by price. + Froogle, refine by price and store

Posted by Gary Price at 8:31 PM | Permalink

July 15, 2005

MSN Shopping Beta Now Available

Brian Smith at Comparison Engines has posted news about today's official beta launch of MSN Shopping. Brian's post includes several comments from Chris Jolley, Group Programming Manager of MSN Shopping.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:06 PM | Permalink

June 15, 2005

MSN Shopping Gets A Blog

Spotted via the Organized Shopping blog, MSN Shopping Insider is a new blog from MSN that is aimed to discuss MSN Shopping. The first two entries cover the PriceGrabber alliance and how the beta of the new service has been closed to the public. More details on both of those moves in our MSN Shopping Partners With PriceGrabber post from yesterday.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:19 AM | Permalink

June 14, 2005

MSN Shopping Partners With PriceGrabber

We wrote in March about MSN beta testing a new shopping search engine. That public beta has since closed. When the improved service relaunches later this year, it looks like it will be at least partially powered by shopping search engine PriceGrabber. MSN and PriceGrabber has just signed a deal to put PriceGrabber listings on MSN by the fourth quarter this year. More details from MediaPost in MSN Shopping To Add PriceGrabber Listings.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:12 AM | Permalink

March 21, 2005

MSN Shopping Beta Tests New Version

MSN Tests Shopping Search Engine from MediaPost has some details about a new comparison shopping service that MSN is testing, the MSN Shopping Beta. Shopping search isn't new to MSN. It's long had a shopping area (once called eShop, now currently MSN Shopping). In fact, a link to shopping search was offered on the MSN Search site until several months ago. It was quietly withdrawn until the new shopping search is ready for a full public debut, I was told earlier this month by someone at MSN. So check out the new beta, which is meant to provide a more comprehensive round-up of products than the existing service along with other features. And expect that shopping link to return at MSN Search in the near future.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:37 AM | Permalink

December 1, 2004

Shopping Search Tips For Advertisers & Merchants

Chris has blogged earlier about articles appearing this week as part of SearchDay's Shopping Search Week 2004. In addition, he's also drafted up a special sidebar article for our Search Engine Watch members. Shopping Search Services for Advertisers and Merchants provides links and more information about various programs offered by shopping search engines that give you more control over what's indexed or better visibility in product listing pages.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:53 AM | Permalink

November 30, 2004

What's New at Shopzilla, Froogle, and MSN Shopping

It's been a busy year for the major shopping search services. BizRate re-engineered its search engine and changed its name to Shopzilla, among other things. And Google added several new features to Froogle and launched a UK version.

Today's SearchDay article, Shopping Search Update 2004, Part 1, describes all of these new enhancements, and more. It's the second installment of Shopping Search Week 2004!, our annual roundup of what's new and improved at the major shopping search engines.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 5:36 AM | Permalink

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