WebProNews

A lot of search marketers recently noticed that the “link:” command isn’t working at Microsoft’s Windows Live search. Well, it’s not a glitch, but a deliberate shutdown by MSFT…

We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators.

Huh? Knock, knock. Anyone home? That “data mining” is likely a whole bunch of search marketers - you know, the ones that help clients to get better rankings in the search engines? The same ones that are all gaga over Google and only just starting to consider whether they should care about traffic from your search engine. You might want to follow Google and Yahoo’s lead and actually provide us MORE data not less.

Let’s hope this other statement by MSFT means they’re going to do just that…

We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries. We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve.

Comments

Tag: