Craig continues his dominant march by…
…effectively marginalizing Microsoft’s classified service.
Tagged: Microsoft RSS
Dustin
5 Reasons Microsoft Search Still Sucks
All the talk about Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google reminded me that I hadn’t checked to see if Microsoft has made any improvement to their search results in quite a while…
I know one term doesn’t make a rule, but I’ve found the term [Seattle Real Estate Blog] to be great for testing out the search engines over the years. Over the past three years, Google has always delivered relevant results for the term, while it used to be full of spam for both Yahoo and Microsoft. It’s interesting to note that Yahoo has made great strides over the past few years, while Microsoft is still lost in the dark.
Here’s the top five results by search engine:
Google [Seattle Real Estate Blog]:
- Rain City Guide
- Seattle RE Prof
- Seattle Bubble
- Ardell’s Seattle RE blog
- Guide to Seattle RE
All of these are great blogs and worthy of being in the top five.
Yahoo [Seattle Real Estate Blog]:
- Seattle RE Prof
- Redfin Corporate Blog
- Rain City Guide
- Redfin Sweet Digs
- Ardell’s Seattle RE blog
Again, all of these are great blogs worthy of being in the top five for the search results.
MSN Live [Seattle Real Estate Blog]:
- “Seattle Real Estate Blog”
- Spam site that’s been around for years… A few years ago the webmaster got very pissy with me when I told him he had to stop republishing EVERY Rain City Guide article in full on his site. There’s nothing original on the site as it is all republished articles from Seattle blogs and news sources.
- seattle-real-estate-blog.com
- Parked domain with no content
- “Real Estate Blogs”
- Landing page with links to actual blogs. This is the best of the top five results, but still not a Seattle real estate blog.
- “Seattle Real Estate and Puget Sound Real Estate – A blog”
- Account suspended by BlueHost. This normally happens when someone is posting spam.
- “Real Estate Blog”
- Takes you to a landing page that says “This blog currently has no posts.”
There results are horrible. Two spam sites, two sites with no content, and one page with a few links. There are some great real estate blogs in Seattle, but Microsoft can’t seem to find them as their search algorithms are still so easily gamed by spammers.
Scoble thinks Microsoft should buy up Facebook and keep it closed to all but their search engine. Personally, I think they’d find a way to screw that up.
UPDATE: NYTs says Microsoft is getting ready to PAY people to use their search. How sad.
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Trace
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Ryan Ward
You think that’s bad? Check the search results for “atlanta reale state” —>
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=atlanta+real+estate&FORM=MSNH
The 50 (read fifty!) pages are subdomains of the same website. That is 500 search results from the same domain for the most trafficked term for Atlanta real estate”
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Dustin
Ryan: Wow! There’s almost something comical about that!
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Brian Requarth
Ryan, I see your website at the top of the list and a bunch of other websites all on different domains. Not really sure I understand what you mean?
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Reno Real Estate
I think Microsoft finally realized this and doggedly pursued Yahoo.
Though I still have my doubts on how they are going to pull it off and do some real competing against google.
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TimJ
…although if you add quotes around the search term,(“Seattle Real Estate Blogs”) I think you’ll see that you get different results on all three. Hmm…
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Ryan Ward
Brian,
Must be a datacenter issue. I posted about this a few months ago on my blog with a screenshot and had people check all over the country. Most people will see subdomain.atlantarealestate.net for the first 498 results!
But hey! If you see me I must be doing something right
somewhere….BTW Brian, where do you see me? I’m like 700 here in Atlanta. Thank God for Google…
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Robbie
For real estate blog searches, Live Search is certainly worse than Google currently is. However, for other topics, it’s usually much better. Oddly enough, a few months ago I ran a search on “how do CDNs work” in which MSN & Yahoo gave me relevant results on Content Delivery Networks and Google’s results were so wrong (Canadian Viagra anyone?), I laughed for 15 minutes. No search engine gets it right 100% of the time, even Google. (Frankly, Yahoo has been giving me better results than Microsoft or Google lately).
For real estate searches, I think Live Search weighs the domain name too heavily in rankings and generates poor results. For searches on technical topics (networking / software) and product / review information (bluray players / mattresses), I’ve been seeing Google’s relevancy lead over Yahoo & Microsoft shrink during the past few months.
Still, I don’t see Microsoft beating Google any time soon. However, I don’t think Microsoft needs to beat Google, they just need to be a competitive #2 and
force Google to play defense. -
Brian Requarth
Ryan, it could be that I am located in South America. I know results vary depending on IP addresses. After I posted I thought that could be it. Anyways, I believe u. I was just confused when I checked the results.
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Jillayne Schlicke
I did a search on the term “short sale” and google carried the blog post I did last March on the first page. It doesn’t show up on the first page of either yahoo or MSN, and the yahoo and msn results looked very similar.
I like how blog posts are given some love on google.
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Dustin
Robbie: I was hoping you’d come around these parts!
I’ll just have to believe you that it does better in some areas, because it definitely misses the boat on real estate related content.And Jillayne: That Short Sale article you wrote is still one of the highest traffic articles on RCG on any given month. It’s huge and so much fun that Google loves it!
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Portland Real Estate
Sad but true… Microsoft just doesn’t seem to understand that they need to make the results better (and faster) than Google’s if they want to compete. Giving people money is just a short sighted way to spend their hoards of cash. At this point, they can’t even get their own staff to use their search engine consistently from what I hear.
Dustin
Sramana Mitra gives Trulia a $100M to $150M valuation and…
thinks they should be one of the next stops on Microsoft’s buying binge.
Dustin
Going way back before I took my job at…
…Move, I landed a 30-minute meeting with Dan Rosensweig (COO of Yahoo at the time), where I tried to convince him that I should lead up a team for Yahoo to build a platform that would help real estate professionals market themselves at a local level using the various tools Yahoo had in-house (at the time, it was something like Yahoo 360, Flickr, upcoming, local business reviews, maps, listings, etc.).
Dan’s strongest argument against such a platform was that I should prove out the concept first by doing it myself since almost all of these platforms had APIs (and theoretically, he was right, but I was looking for a regular paycheck!).
Anyway, I only remembered this story after reading Joel’s post about Seth Godin’s new product: SquidZipper.
Even two years after my call with Dan, the market for providing a free, quality, and local marketing platform for agents is still largely undeveloped… and while one of the real estate focused verticals like Trulia or Zillow could theoretically fill this niche, it still seems like such a no brainer for one of the big guys like Google, Microsoft or Yahoo to take a page from Seth’s playbook and create a niche-specific platform for their various tools!
Seth’s platform is a great idea… but it is still missing the one thing that could really make a platform like this work: an abundance of consumers!
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Ben Martin, Va Assn of REALTORS
So true. I’ve never understood the appeal of Squidoo, and obviously I’m not the only one. For hyperlocal content, blogging still seems like the way to go.
tracytc
From where I sit, Seth has his finger on the exact pulse of consumers and how they behave. They’re going to sit down at a search engine to look for their hyper-local information, and guess what is going to come up? My hyper-local, hyper-focused SquidZipper page, especially because it will link to my hyper-local blog and my hyper-local Squidoo Lens, all of which will point back to my hyper-local SquidZipper page.
Oops! Now that I let the cat out of the bag, I’d better actually head over and set it up. =-D
Dustin
Highlights of the Hitwise data for real estate traffic…
Inman just published the latest Hitwise traffic data for the month of January: Yahoo up, MSN down in latest Hitwise real estate site rankings
My commentary:
- The fact that Hitwise had Move.com bouncing up to #2 last month only only to fall back to #8 the following month says less about Move.com’s traffic and more about the erratic nature of Hitwise data.
- MSN real estate is dropping like a dead weight (below whitefence???). The homepage of MSN probably accounts for a substantial amount of the traffic to MSN Real Estate, so maybe they just put such a large emphasis on election news this month at the expense of real estate stories.
- Trulia got bumped out of the Top 10 by HUD.
Finally, in reading over the fact that Hitwise is giving stats all the way down to real estate websites ranked beyond #1000, I can’t help but wonder where traffic to my websites stand… As bad as Alexa is, some data is better than no data, so I thought I’d plot out a few sites to give me a better perspective:
Here’s what I learned (permalink) about the “Alexa Reach” of some real estate sites:
- The BHB (not ranked) is just below Real Estate Shows (#105)
- 4realz.net (not ranked) and RCG (not ranked) are both getting about the same traffic and well above The Shore Islamorada (#1,062)
Armed with the realization that I run two sites that should be included, I can’t help but wonder how I get my sites on the radar of the Hitwise people. It would probably never amount to much, but I figure that sites like RCG and BHB definitely deserve to be included in this list!
I spent some time on the Hitwise website and I can’t seem to find a way to submit a new site for inclusion in their list. Does anyone know what it takes to get a site included in their “real estate” data?
(Also, there’s a small chance that sites like BHB and RCG are already on their list, but unless someone with access to the full list wants to check that for me, I’m assuming we’re not.)
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Todd Carpenter
Do you actually know anyone that uses the Alexa toolbar? I don’t. Maybe it’s a bigger deal in techie towns. IMO, they might as well throw darts.
The Hitwise pool is much larger, but extrapolated samples tend not to work on very small websites. Even with those big sites, the spread from #2 to #10 is only ~1%, based off sampled data. It’s entirely possible that #10 received more real world traffic that #2 did.
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Dustin
Todd: I love my Alexa toolbar!
Actually, my guess is that it is used mostly by SEO guys at this point!And I agree (especially having seen the backend data of RDC and Move.com month-after-month) that Hitwise et all are like throwing darts. Nonetheless, they make for great conversation starters… and I hate to underestimate the value of a good conversation!
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Tom
Dustin, I think Hitwise buy data from selected ISPs so it’s good for what it exists for, but doesn’t cover everything. Might be wrong, but recall hearing something like that. A bit like a closed sample pool.
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Jake
To me trying to gauge traffic is one of the most frustrating aspects of running a business online. We have seen huge traffic growth in the last 3 months; our uniques have doubled in that time period, with a big chunk of that growth coming in January. So we were very excited to see the hitwise report for January. When it came out it had our main website dropping from 98 to 104. This just confirms to me that none of these tracking systems are very good. I have looked into all of them and none of them are even close on our traffic numbers, but more importunately none of them follow our growth charts. I understand not being able to track the traffic correctly, but the fact that they don’t even come close to tracking our trends is frustrating. Some of our biggest growth months, they have our traffic numbers down and show us having big growth on months that we are flat. I am sure it is a little harder to track in our circumstance, because we are a network of 250 websites with different domains, but I would think that the trend lines would some what match up.
I came from a TV background and was always frustrated at how the entire industry ran off of Neilson ratings when that system is so archaic. After spending the last 4 years in online sales, I realize that the online tracking systems are not really any better. I was excited to see Quantcast raise a ton of VC money last month, they do seem to be going in the right direction. Their numbers don’t match up with ours, but they do tend to trend better than any of their competitors.
If I were you, I would not worry about these tracking systems. The more time I spent looking into them, the more I realized the issues with their data.Jake
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Jake
Lets make that the Nielsen Ratings, not the Neilson Ratings. It’s still early for me.
Jake
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Greg
Alexa is obviously not very accurate because it only counts those who have their toolbar loaded.
It shows my traffic (in the 3-year graph) as going down quite a bit and now being very low, but in reality my blog’s traffic is higher than it ever has been and has has a steady climb upwards since it began.
It would be interesting if anyone who access to the Hitwise full list could let us know how some of the top real estate blogs actually rank and how we compare to other types of blogs in traffic and views.
It would just be interesting to see.
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Incredible Agent
Dustin,
“As bad as Alexa is, some data is better than no data,”
What are you doing man? Alexa? That site is a complete joke. No data is better than BAD data. You need to move on to sites like Compete.com, Quantcast.com or even better Comscore.For instance our site IncredibleAgents.com is ranked right with yours on Alexa…but we have significantly more traffic than any of the RE blogs out there. Blogs always rank higher with Alexa. It’s an antiquated technology…like the horse and buggy.
By the way, the same goes for hitwise as well. I’m not a big fan of toolbar traffic tracking websites. They’re complete BS. That explains why Whitefence.com is on that list.
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Dustin
Okay… I hate Alexa too and am not going to even try to defend it. Here’s the picture that Compete shows for BHD, RCG and RES. It’s completely different and shows a lot more traffic for RES.
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Christian Sterner
I love Alexa, but apparently only because of how wrong they are. For whatever reason, I end up going to that site at least weekly for no other reason than to drastically disappoint myself and scratch my head in wonder. It won’t be 12 hours before I do it again.
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Jeff Turner
Dustin,
Neither Alexa nor Compete are even close to being accurate. They’re worse than a joke, they’re a travesty. I don’t understand why anyone even looks at them or cares. So, using any of these sites to compare RES traffic to BHB, RCG, 4Realz and TSI is ridiculous on it’s face.
Compete is only “better” because it’s extremely bad data is not as extremely bad as Alexa’s extremely bad data. Compete shows our “People Count” at just over 200,000 for January. That’s only wrong by a factor of five, if “people count” refers to unique visitors by ip address.
And this statement, “some data is better than no data” is only true if the data is good. Bad data is never good. Bad data leads to bad conclusions.
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Dustin
I give up! Alexa’s data sucks!
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Tom Royce
Dustin
I have played with Alexa and it is easy to game. It works well as an indicator in the SEO world but not in the RE.net where very few use the tool bar.
The only metric that I really concern myself over is year over year growth for the real estate site. For my other sites it is all about conversions.
We all get so hung up over traffic but the real indicator for me is whether the site is achieving it’s goals.
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Jeff Turner
Tom is right on point.
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louis Cammarosano
Dustin
Comscore/media metrix
compete.com
quantcast.com
hitwise.com
all seem to somewhat off, but sometimes directionally correct, when measuring homegain’s trafficalexa.com is just plain not even close when measuring homegain’s traffic
regards
Louis
p.s. glad you liked my low level understanding of blogging! -
Dustin
Louis,
Definitely do NOT want you to think I think you have a low-level of blogging ability! I’m actually VERY impressed and think you’re doing a GREAT job.
It’s just seemed like you could improve your understanding of the “benefits”… Based on your description of the benefits, I would have thought that the whole activity would be a waste of time.
Best!
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louis cammarosano
dustin,
didn’t I read on this blog a tip – if you want comments to your blog, leave some holes in your argument….
louis -
Dustin
And, Louis, you definitely started an interesting conversation (with a few holes!) worthy of many comments!
Although, if I can make a small request… Can you flip the order of the comments under your blog posts, so that the the first one showed up first under the article? After reading a blog post on your site, I find myself scrolling to the last comment and reading UP in order to follow the conversation… and this is a bit awkward.
Dustin
Forbes likes my idea of MicroHoo turning over…
…their combined real estate vertical to one of the big players in the space:
“And the Microsoft-Yahoo! combo needs to make sure that it owns the cream of these, including Kayak in the travel vertical and Trulia in real estate.”
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Jessie B
Great find Dustin. This makes me smile when I think of the opportunities.
In reading the linked post “The Gap In Google’s Defenses”, also from Sramana Mitra – http://www.sramanamitra.com – there is a very thing we are woking on…
“Consumers need a neutral vertical search engine as their entry point”
Good stuff.
Dustin
I’m with Joel in wondering what…
..MicroHoo would mean for online real estate… (and especially for Move who did not renew the contracts to run the listings behind AOL Real Estate AND Yahoo Rentals last year).
My guess is that it would be a good thing for Move as it would provide at least another year of breathing space while senior execs at MicroHoo focused on trying to synergize their future online ad platforms.
On a REAL wild speculation… I think best thing this combined MicroHoo could do in the real estate space is would be to write a big paycheck to one of the big players (probably Zillow, but even Trulia or Move) and let them worry about real estate while MicroHoo sorts everything else out!
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Missy Caulk
I can’t help but wonder what that will do for Prudential. Will they still come up first because of their strategic partnership with yahoo?
That is one reason I personally don’t use yahoo that much or tell clients to search there. -
Brian Rothenberg
Hi Missy, Brian here from Yahoo!. While Prudential has been and will remain a key partner for Yahoo! Real Estate, we do allow brokers and franchisors nationwide to post listings on our site for free. Any brokerage can submit their listings to us in order to reach our millions of monthly users. You can read more in last month’s press release here: http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=286135
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Dustin
Brian,
I tried searching around the site a bit, but I’m having trouble confirming something…
Does this change mean that you guys are still showing all the MLS listings (via a Prudential IDX feed), but giving preference to the local brokers (over Prudential), when they have uploaded their listings, or are you now ONLY displaying listings from brokers when they have giving you a feed?
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Brian Rothenberg
Dustin,
The default search experience on Yahoo! Real Estate (‘Homes for Sale’ radio button) points to our Yahoo!-hosted listings database that is open to all brokers/franchisors.
We have a separate ‘MLS Listings’ radio button that allows our users to continue to search MLS listings in all major markets via Prudential’s IDX site.
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Dustin
Fascinating…
My guess is that most consumers wouldn’t get that distinction in that they probably don’t even know what “MLS” stands for… and myself, once I saw “homes for sale”, I never would have thought to look elsewhere for the “comprehensive” list of homes for sale.
Dustin
RE.net Acronyms
Jim got me thinking about some of the acronyms that I use on 4realz and other common terms I’ve seen others use:
- AG: AgentGenius.com
- AR: ActiveRain
- BR: BlueRoof
- BHB: Bloodhound Blog
- CB: Coldwell Banker
- CH: Cyberhomes
- CL: Craigslist
- CMS: Content Management System
- CRM: Customer Relationship Management
- FBS: FBS Blog
- FOREM: Future of Real Estate Marketing
- FORET: Future of Real Estate Technology
- FD: FrontDoor
- G: Google
- GDH: Garage with a Detached Home
- HV: HouseValues
- HG: HomeGain
- IC: InternetCrusade
- KW: Keller Williams
- M: Microsoft
- MBL: MyBlogLog
- MLB: MLBroadcast
- MLS: Multiple-Listing Service (this means different things to different people!)
- MLW: MyLevenworth
- NAR: National Association of Realtors
- P2A or P2: Point2Agent
- RCG: Rain City Guide
- RCV: RealCentralVA
- RDC, R or R.com: Realtor.com
- RE.net: The real estate blogosphere
- REB: The Real Estate Bloggers
- RES: Real Estate Shows
- RET: Real Estate Tomato
- REW: Real Estate Webmasters
- REZ: Real Estate Zebra
- RF: Redfin
- RT: RealTown
- SEO: Search Engine Optimization
- SEM: Search Engine Marketing
- TP: Top Producer
- TPG: The Phoenix Real Estate Guy
- T: Trulia
- WM: WellcomeMat
- WP: WordPress.org
- WP.com: Wordpress.com
- Y!: Yahoo!
- Z: Zillow
UPDATE: Based on suggestions in the comments I added a few more names to the above list and decided to alphabetize them. (I also went back and added links to the various sites, which I should have done from the start!)
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Jim Duncan
BHB: Bloodhound Blog
RCV: (as coined by a Charlottesville blog) referring to RealCentralVA. -
Tom
Heh… Isn’t MLS the biggest of them all?
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Dustin
Beautiful!
I’ve seen the BHB before, but somehow missed it’s utility. The past few times I went to write about the bloodhound blog, I’ve been looking for an acronym and forgot the perfectly good one that is available!
I’m adding all three of the suggestions!
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Dustin
In editing things, I also realize that I forgot to add the acronym from the title of the post: RE.net!
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loren nason
FORET
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Jay Thompson
G: Google
Y!: Yahoo. Well…. maybe notBut they aren’t really RE.net terms.
And of course, TPREG – pronounced “Tee Preg”. Originally coined by Maureen Francis I believe. But I think we’re the only two that use it. Hey, I thought about going with Phoenix Real Estate Guy Online and being “Prego”…
Haven’t you ever used DLITGoREB?
Dustin Luther is the Godfather of Real Estate Blogging.
I think I use that in daily conversation!
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Lani Anglin-Rosales
AG = AgentGenius.com
R.com = Realtor dot com
(PS: I couldn’t come up with something clever about me, so insert hilarity [here]).
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Geordie Romer
Someday I hope to have a TLA associated with my business or my blog. (That’s a Three Letter Acronym for those who didn’t spend time as a public servant in the past.)
But if you want to refer to my blog MLW that’s cool too. (Sounds like a Sports League … Major League Winters?!)
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Jessie B
How about everyones favorite
RF = redfin
more…
HV = housevalues
HG = homegainPossibles…
CH = cyberhomes
FD = frontdoor -
Dustin
I’m simply loving some of the suggestions!
Nonetheless, if you’re going to choose one for your own blog (which I don’t mind at all!), give me an example of another blogger using it!
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Dustin
It took me about too minutes to (and Jessie’s comment) to get to me to realize my last comment was dumb!!! Go ahead and coin your own acronym! No examples of it being in use are needed!
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Lani Anglin-Rosales
Examples supporting “AG”: FL Mortg, Blog Fiesta, RErevealed, and hundreds of private emails
YAY, I did it! Man, that was like running around the track 4 times (meaning I’m wheezin’!).
What fancy acronyms do you have for yourself Dustin?
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Chad Hallberg
How could you ever forget YUN 4 NAR PREZ 2008?????
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Lani Anglin-Rosales
Chad, is that Y4NP8?
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Jessie B
one more very important one…
CL = craigslist
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Dustin
Lani: You’re too darn cool! The AG definitely deserves to be on the list!
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Jay Thompson
P2 or P2A: Point2 Agent.
Hey, TPREG is on the Inman Wiki! Oh, wait. I put it there. Back to G and Y!….
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Jay Thompson
RT = Real Town
And now I’m done with this!
TGIF!
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Dustin
Jay,
What if we settled for TPG (The Phoenix Guy)? Similarly, the “official” name of RCG is Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide, but SRCREG just wouldn’t have the same ring!
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Lane Bailey
And here I was looking for GDH (Garage with a Detached Home). Alas, I don’t think anyone else refers to me yet.
Anyway, I will add Real Estate Radio RER…
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Dustin
Lane: Are you thinking of a specific real estate radio show… or just the concept. RealEstateRadio.net is what shows up when I google the term.
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Jay Thompson
Dustin, I love it. That is why you are the GoREB.
Here’s one that some in real estate use:
NAR (which like MLS, can mean very different things to different people).
For some weird reason, I’ve been thinking in acronyms all night.
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Dustin
Totally forgot about NAR! Great call!
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wellcomemat
Dustin… WMNS?
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Phil Thomas Di Giulio
And WMNS is not a reference to WellcomeMat, that’s easy (WM). No WMNS stands for, ‘What’s my name, Skip?”
We know the answer
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Dustin
Phil: I’m thinking “no show”… but that has been fixed!
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Mike Price
how about MLB ?
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Dustin
Major league baseball?
I just added MLBroadcast.(and you just reminded me to add MyBlogLog)
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Michael Wurzer
How about FBS for the FBS Blog?
I also think the FBS Blog would make a fine addition to your RE.net Company category.
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Dustin
Complete oversight on both accounts! It’s gonna be fixed immediately.
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Bucking the Real Estate Trend
Wow. My ADD is out of control this morning. Great list.
What we’re seeing with the state of microsoft search is the result of a 5 year plus project costing billions and the product still doesn’t work, period.l…. hence the microsoft / yahoo deal that has been up and down as of late…. microsoft has yahoo pretty much pinned at this point so it is likely they will be working something out…. we will see soon….