Microsoftâs Live.com Banning Sites for Link Exchanges
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Live.com is banning sites that take part in spammy and irrelevant link exchanges which are designed to corrupt and mislead search engines into ranking such sites highly. Barry Schwartz looks at a thread from Search Engine Watch which published an email from Live.com to a publisher: Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. is removing the beta, or test, tag from Live Search, its next-generation search engine, and making it the underlying search tool at its MSN.com portal. The move comes as Microsoft anxious attempts to gain traction in the search engine market, where it remains a distant third behind leader Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. Because search engine-based advertising is a fast-growing, multibillion-dollar business, Microsoft has invested heavily in improving its search tools and accompanying ad network. But it has failed to make a dent in Google's dominance. In June, Google nabbed 45 percent of all search engine queries in the U.S., while Yahoo got 29 percent and Microsoft 13 percent, according to comScore Networks Inc. This represents a market share reduction for Microsoft of almost 3 percentage points from June 2005. From Tuesday to Thursday, Microsoft will replace the current MSN Search engine on MSN.com with Live Search, which features a revamped image search service, an improved local search, a redesigned user interface and new tools to refine query results, said Derrick Connell, general manager of the Microsoft search business unit. The change will take place progressively on different MSN host servers. When users run a search on MSN.com, they will be taken to a Live Search results page on the Live.com domain, but there will be links there to guide users back to the MSN.com portal, he said. Live Search went intoÂ public beta testing in March at Live.com, the home page of the Live-branded initiative Microsoft launched last year to boost its software-as-a-service offerings. Live.com is also exiting its beta status this week. Among the enhancements in Live Search are new options to view full-size photos in image search results and an increased number of "bird's eye" aerial images in local search, which is shedding its beta label in its U.S. and the U.K. services. Live Search also features a new social search service called QnA, in which users can pose questions and have others chime in with answers. Yahoo, Google and others have similar question-and-answer search services. Â
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Microsoft has been accused of stifling competition by tying its Internet Explorer browser to Windows.
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The Blue Frog system crippled spam-advertised websites by deluging them with opt-out requests, until a retaliatory cyberattack killed it.  Now activists are redeploying the technology to send political messages that can't be ignored. By Ryan Singel.
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Microsoft has sued domain name registrar Red Register claiming that it is illegally profiting from Microsoft&#39;s trademarks.In a lawsuit filed in Seattle earlier this month Microsoft alleges that Red Register snatched up 125 domain names, all &quot;confusingly similar to Microsoft&#39;s Marks&quot; in order to profit from Web advertising, a practice known as typosquatting and cybersquatting.Web surfers may be tricked into clicking on ads on these sites &quot;because the person finds it easier to click on the advertisement or hyperlink than to continue searching for the Microsoft site, or because the person mistakenly believes Microsoft has authorized or endorsed the advertisements,&quot; the filings state.Typosquatting is the practice of registering domain names that contain misspellings of trademark terms. Cybersquatting is the registration of a variant of trademark.Red Register owns domains such as windowslivecare.com, msnmesnger.com, and ageofmathology.com, Microsoft said in court filings.Microsoft is seeking to take control of the Red Register domains and is asking for the court to fine the company for unspecified damages. The lawsuit was filed Dec. 4 in King County Superior Court in Seattle.Although the domains are now registered to a Tortola, Virgin Islands, company named Versata Software, they were previously registered to Red Register and Microsoft believes the current Versata registration information to be false, the filings state.Domain registrars historically made money by registering domain names to third parties, but that has changed as it has become easier to get into the domain name game. Now many registrars have begun to amass portfolios of domains themselves, or even temporarily registering domains and then dropping them before they are required to pay any fees, a practice called &quot;domain tasting,&quot; said Karl Kronenberger, a partner with Kronenberger Burgoyne LLP, a law firm specializing in Internet disputes.Some companies have even set up several domain name registrars and they pass their domain names from one to the other without ever having to pay fees. This is possible, because domains can be held for three days before any fees are due, Kronenberger said.Registrars must be accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the group that oversees the Internet&#39;s domain name system, but once that has happened they can get better access to the database of domain names. Companies like Microsoft and Google have become accredited registrars for this reason.There are presently more than 1,000 registrars worldwide, according to Kronenberger. &quot;It costs US$8,000 per year to maintain your existence as a registrar,&quot; he said. &quot;once you pay that, you can register domains very cheaply.&quot;Some registrars have amassed valuable portfolios without running afoul of trademark law, but Microsoft&#39;s Red Register lawsuit is not unprecedented. In October, Yahoo filed a similar lawsuit against Belgium Domains . One month later another lawsuit was filed against Belgium Domains, this time by Dell.Kronenberger said the Microsoft lawsuit &quot;seems to be a pretty straightforward case of a registrar registering large batches of domains containing trademarks.&quot;Microsoft has filed at least five other similar lawsuits in recent years. In March it announced that reached a $2 million settlement against Jason Cox of New Mexico and Newtonarch LLC. It also announced a $1 million settlement in a similar suit against Partner IV Holdings.Microsoft and Red Register did not immediately return e-mail seeking comment for this story.&#160;
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Five states and the District of Columbia are urging a federal judge to see that Microsoft adheres to certain terms of its antitrust settlement until 2012, claiming that the company is in a position to create a Web 2.0 "chokepoint" with its IE browser. Those terms of the 2002 antitrust settlement are due to expire next month.
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The service allowed consumers to store credit card information for use on Web sites such as eBay. Microsoft Corp. is abandoning one of its most controversial attempts to dominate the Internet after rival technology
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked a federal court to require an alleged Web page hijacking operation to obey previous orders barring unfair and deceptive practices.Walter Rines, business partner Sanford Wallace, and Rines&#39; company, Online Turbo Merchant, diverted users of MySpace.com to other Web sites and barraged them with ads to earn advertising commissions, according to court papers filed with the FTC. The defendants used pagejacking, phishing, and other methods to target MySpace users in violation of a previous court order, the FTC said in a news release.The FTC, in a Jan. 23 filing, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire to order the defendants to give up the money they earned from their MySpace scheme.Rines&#39; listed phone number in New Hampshire was disconnected.In October 2005, the FTC charged Odysseus Marketing and its owner, Rines, with luring consumers to their Web site by offering free software, including a program that supposedly allowed them to engage in anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing. The software was bundled with spyware that intercepted and replaced search results and barraged consumers&#39; computers with pop-up ads, the FTC said. The software also stole users&#39; personal information, and users were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the FTC said.The FTC alleged that the defendants&#39; software captured consumers&#39; personal information and transmitted the information to the defendants&#39; servers. Consumers were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the agency charged. The court ordered a preliminary halt to these practices pending trial, and in October 2006 Odysseus and Rines settled the charges by stipulating to a permanent injunction.The permanent injunction prohibited the defendants from redirecting consumers&#39; computers; from changing any Web browser&#39;s default home page; and from modifying or replacing the functions of any computer application. It required Rines and his company to obtain consumers&#39; express consent before downloading or distributing any content to their computers.The permanent injunction also imposed a $1.75 million judgment, and all but $10,000 was suspended based on the defendants&#39; inability to pay.In its recent filing, the FTC alleges that Rines, his company, and Wallace knew of the permanent injunction and violated that order by diverting users from MySpace.com to their Web sites.
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Found in the search marketing forums: Major Site Exclusion Failure; Reciprocal Links Are (Still) Not Dead; Tips or Tools for Viewing Location-Specific Ads; and more.
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Jeremy Schoemaker, who has been creating a side hobby of revealing MyBlogLog bugs over the past month, has been ironically banned from MyBlogLog. Jeremy posts on Shoemoney.com Since last night every page I visit on their site results in a 403 (Forbidden) error code. I have asked others and nobody else seems to get the error but [...]
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So much for Microsoft&#39;s Can-Spam proposal. Now you can add America Online to the growing list of ventures who&#39;ve rejected a Microsoft-patent-encumbered and lawsuit-challenged anti-spam standard, Sender ID.
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America Online Inc. (AOL) has decided not to fully support Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Sender ID spam-fighting plan after the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the open- source
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Blog: Microsoft has dropped its "Get the Facts" website, but the replacement isn't much better.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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Also: Companies face new rules on e-mails. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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It has been quiet sometime since we heard news related to domain name issues. Microsoft recently had some with a kid named Mike Rowe who opened up a site MikeRoweSoft.
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Not even a club with no rules...yet Microsoft may be going gangbusters on Web 2.0-related technology, but the arrival of tools such as Expression and WPF means little unless they are out there being used.â¦