I can see what they're thinking, more search clicks = enbiggened advertising pie, except this is the page view equivalent of junkmail, wonder if those pesky advertisers will notice or care?

It might make the advertisers happy, but is it really giving them a good name? I don't know what the games are exactly, but I can't believe any adverts get many clicks, purely because people aren't actually interested in the things they're being forced to search...

Maybe Google should offer a free iPhone for every 20,000 searches. I believe they make on average around 10 cents a search, so they could afford it ;)

yes, a momentous achievement.

MS marketing, now even more expensive.

boy, wouldn't it be great if they threw some of that money into creating truly innovative, stable, reliable and secure software? or how about more and/or better support? or even charge somewhat less for their products, making them more affordable for more people?

maybe then they wouldn't have to come up with so many ways to make their numbers look better, as their customers would do it for them...

nah.

"Hacker types have developed bots that can rack up points on Live Search Club - and search results - on their own, but comScore claims such cheating doesn't play into its studies."

A bit rich to call it "cheating" when MS' whole method of increasing the number of search hits is, for want of a better word, cheating.

On a more general note surely this kind of advertising will just decrease the "sales / ads" ratio, making the MS search facility less attractive to advertisers. Once again MS underestimates the intelligence of its audience.

Surely not!!

So it's advertising stats last month and this month its stuffing the ballots for the OOXML standard vote by getting Microsoft business partners to sign up. In Italy for example the committee looking into OOXML went from 5 in May to 83 by mid July.

Someone at Microsoft needs to realise that this sort of behaviour doesn't go unnoticed and it just makes their foot stomping over things like EU fines look even more pathetic.

Google had a problem a year ago caused by automatons racking up bogus adwords clickthroughs.

Isn't this just another form of click fraud, using real people as the automatons?

The people who compile the search engine ratings very obviously need to declare Microsoft disqualified from the stats until the bogus "competitions" are over.

Even better would be for the advertisers to vote with their feet and declare that they're not paying any more advertising bills until the cheating stops.

And because of the types of bot we're using, there's no way they can track it. It plays the games how they should be played and clicks all the right buttons, triggers the search etc. I guarantee our efforts will be reflected in those results.

Isn't that what politicians do every few years ?

Ever since Microsoft had a search engine they've been rigging it.

Does anybody else remember the early days when typing "linux" into MSN search only gave a few dozen hits?

Typing in 'microsoft evil' into live.com, produces no negative content for Microsoft.

Biased or what?

Try the same with Google and you get the truth.