Stuart McHenry - My Internet World

The US real estate market has been down for a while now with the turning point AUG 2007. Today when I was out I saw more real estate agent vehicles than I normally see on a Saturday. Are they getting desperate or are more people starting to buying homes again?

Some markets have stayed strong, the high end buyers looking for Beverly Hills or Palm Springs real estate are effected by the US mortgage mess. Most of these higher end buyers have significant amount of cash as a down payment and usually have outstanding credit scores. The area hot the hardest are the middle class and lower income areas. Most of these areas people got into the cheapest loan and are now paying high payments, if they can even make the payments.

Even though I see more real estate professionals out and about I still think we are in for another 6-8 months at least of dealing with declining sales and the mortgage mess. I wish I was wrong as numerous websites we own are in the real estate mortgage industry.

I hardly ever look at the Yahoo or MSN SERPS but today was checking out a few things and noticed how crappy MSN is. Last night I watched the popular American Idol show so I decided to go search for American Idol on the three major search engines. It turns out MSN has no clue on how to handle sub domains. 15 out of the top 20 search results for American Idol are sub domains for americanidol.com.

Sub domains are not separate websites they are just pages or different categories to a website. There is no reason for any search engine to show more than two per results page. You would think with all the money Microsoft has they would hire smart people to run their search division.