jan 18 p1

Hi All

Here we are in 2005 I hope you all survived the silly season in one piece and had a decent break! Here I am at 8pm starting the newsletter for the year, so till further notice I will be putting this out fortnightly, unless something is particularly interesting ....

The new year begins with MSN hiring for their new PPC team and testing the new search engine, news that amazon.com is still losing big dollars and Google has made some waves with new changes to its AdWords policy limiting the number of ads published by affiliates

• This Weeks Search Engine News
• Article of the Week
• Your Questions Answered
• Rap up & Saying of the week

This Weeks Search Engine News

MSN Hiring for PPC Product
SearchEngineLowdown reports that Microsoft is apparently staffing up to offer a new pay-per-click advertising product. The software giant is looking for account executives and other positions within its MSN division.

MSN's gradual transfer to new search engine
(January 10 2005) MSN has for some time now been testing its new search engine technology at an open beta test site.
Microsoft's confidence in the new search engine is clearly increasing, as the company is now slowly giving more and more regular searchers -- i.e. the ones using the MSN portal -- results from the new search engine.
These searchers are normally given results from an index delivered by Yahoo!
However, as the MSN Search blog explains, the new search engine remains in beta status and MSN will officially launch this service when it is ready.