the browser search

With the browser wars being revived, just for fun, i wondered what msn/google were tweaking their search engines to promote their products.

Out of curiosity, i poked the devil first and logged on to live.com and did the search term "web browser". Now, i am too lazy to take a screen shot and post it out here.. But then do the search and see the result for yourself.. First search result is from the wikipedia.. The second is APPLE SAFARI followed by FIREFOX and OPERA. Internet explorer isnt even being recognized as a web browser in the first two pages of search.. COOL! And even in the related searches section, the firefox browser scored a point above the msn browser.

I next put in the search on google.com. Even though the normal search result did not throw up the google chrome browser and the results were more or less same when compared to msn's search, they had chrome at the top of the search results over there in the sponsored search results.. So, google advertises their products in all the related searches that users do.

Interestingly, a search for "office software" on google throws up office 2007 as a sponsored link and not google's online software. Well food for thought..

P.S On a separate note, the search engines seem to be going the google way in look and feel.. Take a look at live.com (microsoft's), search.yahoo.in (yahoo's) They are not clunky and slow as they used to be earlier too.