We have been hearing stories for a few weeks now about the decline of MSN and Live Search, and Nielsen/NetRatings the other day reported a 10% decrease in year on year growth. That doesn't sound like much, but to put it in perspective Yahoo! and Google rose by 22.6% and 30.1% respectively, ASK managed a 17.2% increase and dammit...Dogpile.com did +2.1%, so what went wrong at Redmond?

That got us chatting in the office about our own experiences with MSN, and our debate kept ending up back at an old iProspect/Marketing Sherpa graph of how people interacted with the different search engines. In contrast to most of their competitors on MSN this survey showed that the paid search results were more popular than the organic ones, roughly a 60/40 split off the top of my head, almost the direct opposite of how users interact with Google.

There are two big changes in the last year or so that could contribute to their decline and they relate directly to this...

1) MSN change their provider of paid search listings to themselves, and lets be honest, for ages there were practically no advertisers across most results and advertisers that wanted to load campaigns couldn't get it done quick enough. Even now they lack the diversity and volume of advertisers that Yahoo! Search had. That's gotta slam your user experience.

2) MSN change to Live Search. So now not only are they lacking the results the majority of their users expect to see so the whole 'search as navigation' paradigm is broken, they've probably also aliented a few of them as well by switching the interface.

Our feelings are, that even though both decisions seem good, the net result is that they conspired to drive users towards Google and in particular Yahoo! which could provide the experience more akin to what traditional MSN users were expecting.