I am sure most people are by now aware of Microsoft’s hostile offer to buy out the internet portal Yahoo! A lot of people have discussed about their views on the same . If Yahoo’s board of directors do accept to be taken over by MS there might be several changes to the company, it’s employees, culture, the portal , the services etc. Since Yahoo! has not yet given any proper response except the typical “we are looking at the benefits of the offer and those of our shareholders”. Instead of posting what I think could go or stay , I have put up a poll cum survey ( made free by Polldaddy), for the visitors like you to participate in. You can have your say which of the services of Yahoo you like , which stand a chance to be replaced by a MSN venture and so forth. Enjoy .

2 days back , i received a call from a girl , who introduced herself as from Yahoo India. Almost before i slapped down the phone, as I was almost fed up with tele-callers from various credit card companies and financial institutions, i heard the name Yahoo luckily . I have never worked in the tele-calling department / industry, but most of the tele callers i have faced never do any level of necessary homework . I understand that most times that is not a possibility, for all i know, these people may get paid by the number of persons called up and not by the numbers of accounts bagged . But in my opinion it would go a long way making the sale …. at least to know the business of the person they call up.
In this case, the girl did not even know that I am into web development , even though she knew the name of my company’s website , which is “websys.co.in” . Nevertheless , she was quite bent on explaining me all about PPC , Yahoo and similar topics, which i did not have any interest of hearing. I was already ready to take the account, as I was also reading about the same topic on Sitepoint’s Search Engine Marketing Kit . Anyway , finally she gave the phone to her senior .
Her senior was little more to the point , and was able to help me sign up quite quickly and activate my account , setup a first campaign , add keyword to it etc. I now have 2 ads running . but here comes the not-so-happy part .
Yahoo Search Marketing India , probably because it is newer than its parent , left much to be desired. It does not even have half the options I was reading about , which is obvious from just by looking at the FAQ , which I should have earlier – feature wise, the “Senior” person who was helping me was not even fully knowledgeable about his own product . I had asked him ” Ok, thanks so I now have my Ad running on your network but what is my reach … is it on Yahoo or Yahoo India ” and the guy went like ” Don’t worry , your ad is now running on Yahoo.com, MSN.com , and various of our other partners because you used “Content Match , Advance Match” etc . But i was little uncertain , so I asked him to run a search for web hosting , on both Search.Yahoo.co.in and Search.Yahoo.com, which demonstrated totally different ads on the sponsored listings box. So the guy then requested to call me back with more info , which he did within 15 minutes and confirmed my fear . Well , I wont say fear as I didn’t really expect to pay a 0.50 p CPC and get my ad on top at Yahoo.com or MSN.com lol . But , just so you know , Yahoo Search Marketing does have partners like MSN , but it is Msn.co.in and similar .
When the person was also demonstrating me the Keyword Selector Tool i had queried whether i can save my current searches – online or download for analysis / future – i also had a extremely difficult time explaining what i was trying to do , and “WHY – i would need to do that ”
Nevertheless, i am currently receiving daily reports of my first paid campaign , at a very low cost and I was able to learn / gather / answer some of my own queries, so overall i would say i am somewhat satisfied . What remains to be seen is what this experimental project goes , and then i will venture to bigger pond of international Search Engine Marketing .

Following the lead of google , MSN / Live now has a webmaster central . If you have been a webmaster for the past 2-3 years , you would be finding it very limited as compared to google webmaster central, but it is surely looking similar – with options to submit your xml sitemap , robots.txt checker for your domain etc.
It does require a existing LIVE account …. but not necessarily a Hotmail account . I login to MSN Messenger using my work email id , which i had long back associated using passport , so i could easily use the same here as well.
It does require you to have an XML sitemap for your website , which should be created using the same sitemaps protocol as google and yahoo. Once you do so , it shows your websites listed pages and links, provided you already have been indexed . If not , this would help them follow up your website at some point of time. Going by the way LIVE / MSN is trying to improve , this will surely help i can safely say .
However , in my experience i found their options too limited , as i said before … as well their results also pretty poor . It gives you results on which of your websites pages are ranking good and for which terms , but if you try to check back on it , it is no where the same.
Some people probably has termed it as another pagerank , but MSN has coined it as Domain Rank.
Sign up at this link : http://webmaster.live.com/