State of Local

MSN Live Search, which has been trailing Google by around 60 percentage points in usage over the past few months, unveiled a direct competitor to Google’s news aggregator this week. Live Search News was first reported by CNet on Tuesday night. The Live Search Blog has yet to announce the launch.

As a user, you get a simple main column of top stories that appears to be accurately detecting duplicates and suggesting relateds. A right sidebar highlights news from local sources, presumably by detecting my IP. It got my state right, but all eight stories are from the same source: the local CBS TV station. It’s odd, because while some major local publications are being left out of the index entirely, several others are in — and just not listed as local.

So as a publisher, the first thing to do is make sure your site is included in the results. You can use the site: operator command to view the stories on your domain that Live has in its index.

For example, most of our Internet Broadcasting sites are doing well. The top results for WNBC, Channel3000 and Click2Houston are all fairly recent — not “live,” but within the past hour or two. (Strangely, all three have exactly 126 results.)

We have problems, though. Some of our sites that have changed their primary domains since the end of last year (WISN, KITV, KMBC) are not included. If this were Google, I would know what to do; there are submission forms to notify Google News of domain changes. But I know of no such forms provided by MSN (even in the Live Search Webmasters interface), so we might be at the mercy of their spiders to get recognized.

I’m curious to see if Live Search will accept xml site maps for news, and if so, what they’ll look like. Dynamic xml site maps are a great way to make sure that the major search engines know about your content. You don’t wait for them to index you; when you have a new story, you feed it straight to them.

So when Google, Yahoo and MSN agreed on a standard xml format for general site map feeds, it really eased our development and submission processes. And when Google defined its own format for specifically for news feeds, we made one of those, too. I mean, they’re Google, right?

But Live … I don’t know. They’d be wise to follow Google’s lead in news and accept the same format, because I’m not sure we would spend the time developing another series of feeds for an engine with such low marketshare.