I had just noticed that Microsoft has launched its own webmaster central tool last November.

I’m slightly behind in getting the latest update about Microsoft Live Search or Yahoo search due to the less ‘participation’ of this search engines in my websites . All 3 main search engines now has its own webmaster tool, even though they all have different tools and the functions. Google has a famous Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo with Yahooexplorer and Microsoft with Live Webmaster Central

Basic Functions

~adding sitemap
~validate robots.txt
~number of pages indexed
~search results against specific keywords.

Back to Live Webmaster Central, the features are basically less than Google Webmaster, but I can consider it better than Yahoo Site explorer. It also has a function to validate robots.txt file, but it seems to work differently from what was inside Google Webmaster. This format below is validated in Google Webmaster successfully but not here . I guess I need to read more about robots.txt standardization later.

Line #7: Disallow: /*?
Warning: MSNBOT doesn't support wildcard characters.

Line #3: User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Error: * and another agent can't be specified on the same line.

Adding website to this tool is simple, it works the same like Yahoo and Google’s tool. 1 important feature that is missing here is statistics. It should show at least which page is indexed, not only the number of pages indexed.

Overall

Google Webmaster is still leading Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo Search in terms of functionality offered inside. It is still a long way to go for Live Search Webmaster to catch up with Google Webmaster. Google Webmaster has its functionality added or enhanced from time to time, and hopefully Live Search Webmaster will follow Google’s step. I don’t see Yahoo Siteexplorer getting any enhancement or additional function on recent months.

Search Engine comparison

If you’re interested to know more about main search engines, Aaron of SEOBook has made a very interesting comparison on that.

Screen capture

Here is the screen shot of what was inside this tool. Have fun.