A New Search for MySpace

garzpacho writes "Businessweek is reporting on MySpace's new strategy. They're going to pit the large engines against each other in a bidding war to provide the popular social networking site with a new search engine. From the article: 'Search is a driver of traffic and advertising revenue for other major Web destinations, but it's a largely untapped source of growth for MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media properties such as online gaming site IGN and sports site Scout. Given MySpace's power, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are expected to compete fiercely for the right to be the search engine of choice for MySpace and the rest of Fox Interactive. News Corp. won't say how much money it expects to derive from a deal, but industry experts say it could conceivably boost MySpace's annual revenue several times over.'"

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[brenddie]

Even if google doesnt "win" you can always insite:myspace my searches.
Thats if they dont hide content from other search engines, if they do then its their loss.

Non-structural markup

[illtron]

MySpace has got to be an absolute nightmare for any search crawler to dig through. The markup on all the pages is absolutely horrible. Maybe a partnership with Google could help convince them that their pages are built for 1996, not 2006, which is extremely sad for a site that's only been around for two years. Structural markup would make it a lot easier to find the relevant info.