14 DAY TRIAL // Whether Microsoft likes it or not, the truth is that the Windows 7 genie is out of the bottle. For the Redmond company, there are two viable options at this point, to either attempt sweeping Windows 7 under the rug, or to completely ignore the operating system. This because bringing Windows 7 to center stage and taking Windows Vista out of the limelight does not represent the best course of action for Microsoft. Courtesy of the translucency strategy set in place by Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, the man responsible for leading the development projects of both Windows 7 and Windows Live Wave 3, Microsoft is indeed ignoring the successor of Windows Vista.
The Redmond company will not confirm, will not deny, and simply will not address in any manner the subject of Windows 7. But from here to censoring results pointing to Windows 7 on the Internet is quite a long way. Or is it more of a blurred boundary instead? Well, some reports indicate that while Google and Yahoo are correctly identifying and returning results to users' searches involving the term "shipping seven", Microsoft's Live Search is suspiciously failing to do the same. The fact that "Shipping Seven" is allegedly a blog put together by an anonymous Microsoft employee to offer inhouse details about Windows 7, and the websites' omission from Live Search has prompted speculation that the Redmond company has been filtering the results of its search engine.
Microsoft has of course denied that it is tinkering with the results of Live Search. According to the company, the results returned by the search engine, and their ranking, come solely as a consequence of the frequency in which the engine crawls a specific website. Microsoft stressed the fact that the entire process is algorithm-based and that it is not messing around with the organic results. This could be very well true, and it could be just a simple case of the Live Search indexing process having gone wrong.
"I'm not ranking in Live Search, what can I do?" asked Jeremiah Andrick, Live Search Webmaster Team. "That's a good question... If your site is not performing in Live Search or you are not being indexed by Live Search here are some steps you can take to change course and improve your rank. First and foremost at Live Search ranking is free and you can't pay to boost your website's relevance ranking. We have a completely automated ranking process which takes into account a lot of different factors. These factors include web page content, the number and quality of websites that link to your pages, and the relevance of your website's content to query terms."
