Google Blogoscoped

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

MSN Shows Strange SEO Contest Behavior

The MSN search engine is showing a weird behavior. When you search for V7ndotcom elursrebmem, you get zero results. But search for V7ndotcom elursrebmem charity, you’ll get... 1,949 results.

Other queries, like V7ndotcom elursrebmem -3298398, also return results.

Now obviously if a search which returns zero results gets more refined, there should be zero results still, as search queries default to AND, not OR. Alek, who also put up a contest page and is closely following the results for this SEO contest, wonders if MSN is filtering – censoring – results.

Update: Alek points out another noteworthy (some may say weird) behavior, this one with Yahoo. A Yahoo search for backlinks to Alek’s page shows Google Blogoscoped in the list. However, so far I only linked to Alek’s contest page using the “nofollow” attribute value to not skew the competition results. Now it’s not wrong per se for Yahoo to show this backlink – after all, Yahoo may index and show the backlink, and still not attach any linkjuice to it – but this is an interesting find nonetheless.

Update 2: There are now results on MSN for both search variants.

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