Microsoft News Tracker

Tool Generates Fake Searches for Privacy:

A new tool seeks to make your searches more private by hiding them in plain sight. TrackMeNot periodically sends fake, innocuous queries to search engines, making it harder for someone to glean your actual search habits by reviewing the companies’ logs that contain your queries.

The AOL release of barely veiled user search data is the proximate cause, but think about this a minute - each user of this program is going to be generating a lot of fake searches.

The tool, developed by two researchers at New York University, sends random searches, such as “boston clock” and “croissant,” to the four largest search engines — Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN and AOL. A fake search is made every 12 seconds under default configurations; the tool can generate millions of unique queries from its list, and users can add their own.

A whole lot of fake searches! Aside from the added traffic on the engines, if the searches are evenly distributed, I guess we can expect Google’s share to drop and MSN’s to rise. Then there’s what it does to keyword popularity and search ad pricing. The only saving grace is that there aren’t likely to be that many folks who want to have their browser chugging away in the background generating 300 searches an hour. Anyhow, if you want to do your part to increase entropy, TrackMeNot is available here, but requires Firefox.

The rumored restricted beta of Windows Live OneCare Family Safety turned out to be a public trial offer of the parental control software for Windows XP:

You might have heard back in March that we were doing some limited beta testing on parts of a new, free family safety service called Windows Live Family Safety Settings. The features we tested earlier this year represented just a portion of the full service we’re making available today, and we’re excited to announce the release of our new Windows Live OneCare Family Safety public beta available in the US through http://ideas.live.com.

Hit the link for more details, but for now the trial is USA only. And as surmised, a little rebranding has gone on since the original announcement which isn’t all that bad in this case since this is PC software like Windows Live OneCare and not Web-based like most of the rest of the Windows Live family. Also like OneCare, I would expect that this would eventually be a fee-based service, although there is no mention of that and the above clip has the magic word, “free.” Is it too soon to wave goodbye to the little software companies trying to make a buck in this market or do we wait until Vista comes out with similar functionality built-in?

Today’s Microsoft adCenter is just Microsoft’s mechanism for advertisers to buy contextual ads on MSN Search (and the Windows Live Search beta), but it took another step on the way to becoming a full-fledged contextual ad competitor to Google and Yahoo by rolling out a new beta. Jennifer Slegg has the story on her blog:

Interested in the Microsoft ContentAds beta? Selected advertisers just received invitations to participate in the new ContentAds pilot, which begins running this fall.

The email invited advertisers received mentioned the various MSN properties than contextually targeted ContentAds would appear on, such as MSN Real Estate and MSN Money, as well as others linked from the main MSN portal. However, it was key noticing the exact text (emphasis mine in the following) and what it means for publishers.

Content Ads is Microsoft’s next product that allows advertisers to place content-targeted, text-based advertisements primarily on Microsoft-owned properties including MSN Money, Real Estate, and many others within the www.msn.com portal.
…
ContentAds will also be utilizing demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding tools for all advertisements as well …

There’s more by following the link, but Slegg’s point is that not only is Microsoft expanding their ad coverage to other MSN properties besides search, but it looks like they might be getting ready to include third party publishers as well. That would truly be getting to bat in the big leagues and one obvious candidate is Facebook, where the recent deal with Microsoft mentioned adCenter prominently. However, since adCenter also has aspirations to handle all of Microsoft’s advertising services including display ads, it may be a red herring for now.