SEO Expert, Evangelist and SEO Consulting Services - Tony Adam

According to the Nielsen online reports it seems like Microsoft has increased its search market share from 12% to 13.8% in December from the previous month. (See MarketWatch Article) All things considered it seem that Microsoft has picked up close to 2% of the search market, a big gain for the company. So, if we can trust the Nielsen online ratings, what has attributed to the gain?

Now, a lot of people are talking about Google losing “search share”…but I really want to focus on Microsoft. More specifically, I want to examine the current promotional aspect of Microsoft’s search space. They have been trying to push the Live Search Club to searchers to give away prizes like t-shirts, etc. Something that I found interesting about this, was trying to create a “search community” more than giving away prizes.

In a world of increasingly popular social media sites like Digg, Reddit, etc., does creating a social or “prize give away” aspect to search give users a reason to use a search engine more then the next one? Is it possible to push people away from the mammoth lead that Google has gained and sustained? At the very least, could Microsoft make a push into second place, pushing Yahoo! to third?

Granted, really making a play at taking over second place in the search engine wars is a REAL possibility since Yahoo! is in flux at the moment. The question really is, can Microsoft take a good amount more of the search share away from Google? Or, is this promotional aspect to Microsoft Live Search an attempt at gaining fickle traffic that will begin to fizzle away as it looses its gusto?

Interesting notice about the Apple iPod having some issues with Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system.  Apple has announced that the iPod could possibly get corrupted by using Vista with the current iTunes platform.

Apparently the iTunes service would not download a listing of songs that you have purchased, but that problem has recently been taken care of.  More disconcerng though is the fact that if you choose to eject your iPod through the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon, there have been users reportedly experiencing some corruption to the iPod.

Microsoft has recently released patches to fix the above mentioned item pertaining to the iTunes service not functioning properly.  At this point though, Apple is asking users not to upgrade to Windows Vista until a newer version of iTunes is released in a couple weeks.  Microsoft is taking the approach that the iPod should be fine.  The end all, be all question is, will this hurt Microsoft sales in the interim and long run?  Will Microsoft Windows Vista lose sales and will the iPod users hold back and cause a major drop in Vista sales?  Or, are users going to continue to upgrade and install Windows Vista either way?

Recently I took a test spin of Windows Vista Beta 2 on my desktop to see how it would stand up to the test.  Unfortunately, it was completely buggy and had major issues.  Although, we do know that this is no where near shipping, but, will it ever live up to its potential?  I have some belief that they are making some major efforts towards really locking it down and cleaning up buggy code.  But, will this suffice?  With all the push back already, is a Beta 3 release before the actual Release Candidate actually enough to release a strong and secure OS.  We keep hearing about the persuit for quality as of late.  Personally, I’m interested in seeing the end result in 2007, to see if the expectations will truely measure up.