The first battle begins with a match-up between MSN‘s Kelly Thomas and Yahoo’s Jim Lampley. By winning the best two of the three rounds, MSN takes the victory and is ready to take on reigning champion Vanessa Fox of Google, who won the sumo wrestling championship fight at the SES conference in San Jose.

To win this championship round, MSN or Google has to conquer the most of the five rounds. Fox begins confident and strong and takes out Thomas in the first two rounds. MSN strikes back at Google by winning the next two rounds. The score is now tied with one round left to go. As if Google and MSN didn’t have enough butterflies already, the judges made a controversial equipment replacement. The officials made this decision in order to keep the competition fair for the final round.

So, who takes the role as the best search engine of this Rock Em Sock Em fight? We would love to share the results with you, but we want to keep you biting your nails in suspense. Watch the video and find out and let us know what you thought of the outcome below!

"He's dead, Jim!"
-- Dr. McCoy, Star Trek, far too many episodes to list here.

It appeared for a while that Microsoft was in the process of doing what some have expected it to do since its corporate reorganization took place last month: shutting down MSN in favor of Windows Live.

Back in March, Microsoft said of the reorg that it was focused on lining up “Windows and MSN assets with Microsoft’s overall Live strategy.” During yesterday’s outage, MSN Search had this to say to visitors:

Or to paraphrase Edgar Allen Poe, ‘quoth the raven, 404′.

But the service returned after its hiatus. As to where it was during the downtime, no one knows. The MSN Search blog has not been updated since its Search Macros post of March 28th.

The King County Journal reported on an email received from a Microsoft spokesperson that the company was trying to figure out what had happened.

Other than an assortment of chuckles posted at Threadwatch (“They can’t figure out how to restart IIS correctly”; “shouldn’t that screen be blue?”), there hasn’t been much notice of the outage.

Since Windows Live was available during that period, users could still search there. It is strange that Microsoft didn’t place a link on the outage page to Live to try and keep some of that traffic from just punching out and heading to Google or Yahoo instead.

And then MSN Search returned, as quietly as it had departed. New features? None apparent. Back-end upgrade? Unknown.

One guess would be some kind of issue with the contest Microsoft has been running since February. Based on user searches, the contest can make a winner out of someone who queries certain keywords at MSN Search. Prizes range from gift cards to plasma HDTVs, so perhaps the temptation to win something led to an attempted compromise of the service by a third party.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The reasoning was that the box was “obstructing Googles services from operating efficiently and effectively”. The blogger, Roberto Dohnert, was told to remove the search box, and plans asking Google the question on everyone’s mind, “What the hell are you talking about?”

I find it hard to believe Google has an official policy against using non-Google search boxes. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that this was just an oversight, and that we’ll see this whole thing just dissapear. I hope.

(via Digg)

UPDATE: The entire blog has vanished from Blogspot. You can read it in the Google cache. That either screams “scam” or really bad situation. Considering the blog has archives going back to June 2004, I’ll let you draw whatever conclusions you’d like until we hear more.

UPDATE 2: Looks like he moved to WordPress.com hosting. Gee, this is a great endorsement for BlogSpot. (via Sean-Paul Kelley > Findory)

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.

March Madness Comes To MSN Search

How do you get your hoops fix in March? Would you use a search engine to deliver your scores, or do you prefer sports websites? Hit us on the fly with your comments at WebProWorld.

College basketball fans who are stuck in cubicles while the early rounds of the NCAA tournament take place can keep up with the scores through MSN Search. While the jaded Internet user may not see this as the useful benefit it is, the deal between Fox and Microsoft offers a very positive side.

First a quick overview of what MSN Search will do with Instant Answers and the tournament. By typing in the name of a school, like University of Kentucky, MSN Search returns the real time score of that team’s game taking place. Previous game results and next scheduled game details will also appear.

Do a query for March Madness, and MSN Search brings back the real time updates for all the games in progress. Also, Microsoft and Fox Sports have an online bracket contest planned where the top three winners will receive high-definition televisions.

Ok, now I’ll address the question of how this is a good alternative for the cubicle-imprisoned. While anyone can indeed hit ESPN, CBS Sportsline, or even the regular Fox Sports website for scores and information, those visits could be used against the innocent hoops fan.

Many companies track their employees’ Internet usage, and use software that sorts surfers by how many megabytes traffic they have generated. All of those sports sites do a great job of delivering rich media in the form of images and even videos. On a usage report, that rich media will inflate the traffic number greatly.

Other firms may use their filtering software or access control lists to block access to sports sites entirely. Either way, poor Mark from Advertising is in deep trouble when the boss sees the reports on just what Mark has been doing instead of finishing his catalog page layouts.

I used to be one of those IT oppressors, and generated and distributed those types of reports. I have since turned away from the Dark Side, which is a good thing because my child is old enough to handle a lightsaber and I’d like to keep my right arm. Daddy’s reformed, son, see?

Search traffic provides primarily text-based results. Innocuous queries to MSN Search generate little traffic and less notice among the more uptight breed of controlling management types. Hopefully MSN Search has provided a little ray of sunshine for basketball fans in those oppressive environments.

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