Links and Search Engines: The MSN edition

I’ve been promis­ing for a while to com­plete this series with results relat­ing to MSN (and, for the record, this has noth­ing to do with Scoble beg­ging for it). I finally got around to clean­ing up the HTML out­put of Excel and can now present the third (and prob­a­bly final) install­ment in my analy­sis of search engine link features.

To recap, I ini­tially took the list of Top 100 blogs listed by Tech­no­rati on May 19th, 2005 and started doing side by side com­par­isons. I ini­tially looked at dis­tri­b­u­tion of links among the top 100, then fol­lowed up with an analy­sis of Tech­no­rati against Google, this brought me to a sub­se­quent chap­ter on Tech­no­rati against Google and Yahoo! (then com­par­ing Google and Yahoo! to each other). All this cre­ated some fair amount of buzz in the search world, with peo­ple say­ing it was inter­est­ing to other say­ing I was way off the mark. Either way, it’s time to take a look at MSN, in order to com­plete this round-up.

So, to cre­ate some bench­marks, let’s start tak­ing a look at dis­tri­b­u­tion of Tech­no­rati links against MSN’s:

Of course, no big sur­prise here. This seems to be pretty con­sis­tent with what I had found in deal­ing with Google and Yahoo!, show­ing that Tech­no­rati does a good but not com­plete job at index­ing link-backs. What’s inter­est­ing, how­ever, is that Tech­no­rati seems to have a dif­fer­ent pat­tern when deal­ing with MSN than it does with Yahoo or Google. Let me show you what I’m talk­ing about. Fol­low­ing is the pat­tern of Tech­no­rati dif­fer­en­tial with MSN:

… and now is the dif­fer­en­tial between Tech­no­rati and Yahoo..

.. and finally the same graph between Tech­no­rati and Google

I’ve been try­ing to under­stand why this is and still have no clear answer, to be fully hon­est. Could be some­thing, could be noth­ing. I’m not sure at this point and this is, in large part, one of the thing that was frus­trat­ing in work­ing on this entry. I’m not sure there is some­thing there, to be very honest.

Com­par­ing the Search Engines

How­ever, the pic­ture gets more inter­est­ing when you get the three search engines side by side. Here’s a quick spread­sheet of the results:

The most inter­est­ing thing here is that MSN seems to prove the asser­tion I had made regard­ing Google not pro­vid­ing as many links as Yahoo does. The same seems to be true between MSN and Google. There were, how­ever, a few sur­prises here, as far as I’m concerned:

• Sites located in the United States seem to fair bet­ter, on MSN, than other sites. Google and Yahoo seem to have a stronger index­ing pres­ence out­side the US than MSN does.
• MSN spaces sites are not get­ting par­tic­u­larly great rep­re­sen­ta­tion in MSN search, com­pared to its com­peti­tors. I was sur­prised by this since they are part of the same service

Con­clu­sions and more!

So there you have, no great insight here apart from the fact that this link­ing stuff is inter­est­ing and that even small scale analy­sis can bring up some inter­est­ing trends. As I men­tioned before, I am not an expert on this and thought to put together the num­bers and start an analy­sis. How­ever, I know that this series has attracted experts so here’s a deal: I’m mak­ing the spread­sheet of data I com­piled avail­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons License (By Attri­bu­tion, Share Alike) here on TNL.net. If you man­age to do any­thing inter­est­ing with it, drop me a note and please make sure that you share it with the wider pub­lic. Enjoy!