Microsoft Launches Paid Search

Australian IT: MICROSOFT will start selling paid search listings, which allow advertisers to purchase advertising space alongside search results, on its MSN website.

The widely expected move comes as Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, continues to take on Google in the web-based information and services market.

At stake is the lucrative income from online advertising, particularly ads that are displayed next to search results, the main driver of search leader Google’s revenue.

This had to happen eventually. The big three search companies in order of popularity are Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search. Google has long been the leader in the Internet paid search industry and derives most of it’s billion dollar income from paid search listings. Yahoo! is slowly getting things together after buying Overture and now the last of the big three, MSN Search, is joining the game.

I’ve already started to see what appears to be paid search listings in things like my Hotmail account and other Microsoft Network sites. It will be interesting to see how well these listings perform against the other options in the Pay Per Click arena.

I don’t think I’d want to see too many players entering the Pay Per Click paid search industry or at the least I’d prefer not to see many dominant players. Google dominating at the moment is a good thing because you can focus all your efforts on one search engine and get great results. If all three search engines were equal and the systems to advertise on them were all different (as they are now) then maintaining a paid search campaign would be just that little bit harder. It would open more doors for good PPC campaign management software/tools/services if you were thinking business opportunities like a good entrepreneur should.

I wonder if we will see the rise of niche search engines that actually manage to do well, Blinkx being the only example I can think of now that is reasonably well known. For example, why not a shopping search engine, or news search engine, or blog search engine…wait a second, doesn’t Google already do all that? Perhaps I’ve just answered my question. But seriously there must be other niche concepts begging for a dedicated search engine beyond what we already have covering the most popular industries such as music and news.

How about a search engine focused entirely on Internet business that had amazing filters removing all the “get rich schemes” and putting all the great content sites to the top. Now I’d being using that and advertising on it too!