More on Amazon & Microsoft’s Search Partnership
Over the weekend Wendy Boswell broke the news on Amazon’s A9 and Alexa search engines switching over to Microsoft’s Live Windows Search from Amazon’s long time partner in Google.
In addition, Search Engine Journal published an overview of the new partnership and reasons for Amazon.com making the switch from Google to MSN. I also looked a bit into what this means for MSN’s adCenter keyword advertising network.
This morning I’ve found two other points of interest coming out of the new partnership including the amount of traffic Microsoft should attract to Windows Live and adCenter out of the deal and the positive PR spin this new partnership brings to Amazon.com search properties.
Bill Tancer writes on the Hitwise blog that Google was Amazon.com’s top downstream site (where users visit when clicking off of Amazon.com):
Hitwise clickstream data can provide us with some insight into the magnitude of this decision, both from the perspective of Amazon’s downstream to Google as well as Google’s upstream to Amazon.
At over 8%, Google is the #1 downstream site for Amazon. This is most likely the result of Google sponsored listings appearing within the Amazon domain as well as some non-referred traffic from Amazon to Google. It’s also interesting to note that the downstream percentage to A9 from Amazon is only 1.8%.
Next Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable mentions Dave Naylor’s thoughts on the partnership and how A9 and Alexa have received some mighty beefy press:
DaveN mentioned on WebmasterRadio.FM yesterday that he thinks this is an incredibly smart move for Amazon.
Amazon has generated so much buzz about A9 and Alexa with the announcement, it is huge. If they would of just resigned with Google, no one would have paid any attention. If they would have dropped Google for Yahoo, there would have been a splash. But partnering with Microsoft, now that makes a huge statement and generates a ton of buzz.
Going back to the whole adCenter deal, I’m also thinking that Microsoft’s behavioral targeting and user profiling for the adCenter advertising program will also get a bit of a boost, as all kinds of information can be gathered via the serving of such ads – even if the end user does not register with MSN, search via Live Windows or use an IE browser.
