MSN Search Tracking Clicks
A little bird emailed this morning to inform Search Engine Journal that MSN Search (which seems to be very slow today) is now tracking clicks and click thru. Thanks little bird. The new user tracking by MSN is probably qite similar to Yahoo’s search result click tracking, which tracks users profiles and their search behavior. Like Yahoo, MSN is planning on rolling out a behavioral and search based advertising interface this fall in the US termed MSN Keywords.
For an example, try a search for “games” on MSN. Then, mouseover the links in the search results. When clicking thru on the AddictingGames.com site’s listing, the following URL is given : http://g.msn.com/9SE/1?http://www.addictinggames.com/&&DI=293&IG=3e8…&POS=5&CM=WPU&CE=2&CS=AWP&SR=2 . The identifying variables in the search string are DI, IG (the longest which may be the user identification), POS (position?), CM, CE, CS, and SR (search result?).
Upon trying to compare other search results I got the message that the MSN Search Server was down and will try later. Here is the message : Gateway Timeout, The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server. Reference #1.f4c89dd2.1125990402.79ad29
