Talk about marketing that backfires. (Not that we were.) Microsoft placed billboard and banner ads around Redmond suggesting a search for "Pizza in Redmond." Todd Bishop of SeattlePI took the challenge, going so far as to compare results in MSN Search with those in Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves. wouldn't you know it, MSN returned the least useful local results. The first result of a local search for that key phrase was a site for janitorial supplies. Yikes. Now this story is getting blogged all over the place and MSN Search has a PR fiasco on its hands.
The "Pizza in Redmond" Fiasco
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Wow. Not exactly a massive crisis communications problem but it definitely does not make the product look good! I wonder if they learned anything from the MSN Spaces launch and the "7 dirty blogs" fiasco. If they did - they should be blogging in response, or commenting the blogs of others.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Search Gal
1. I had to try it. Figuring that Pizza in Redmond would be fixed by now, I ran Pizza in Ronkonkoma and the results were similar:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH&srch_type=0&q=pizza+in+ronkonkoma
http://www.google.com/search?q=pizza+in+ronkonkoma&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
Google wins again.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by pat