• by Shankar Gupta , February 16, 2006

The same week that MSN unveiled a sweepstakes competition for search users, bloggers began publishing the equivalent of answer keys--lists of the terms that will trigger a chance to win MSN prizes.

In an effort to increase traffic at its search engine, MSN this week bowed a contest for search users; if users query on a "winning" keyword, a link informing them that they may have won a prize will appear in the sponsored link space. At that point, users are prompted to submit their names and other information.

On Tuesday, blogger "Oilman" of Oilman.ca found that MSN appeared to have used a rudimentary search engine optimization tactic, "keyword stuffing"--which involves including the secret contest-winning keywords in the site's meta-keywords tag. Oilman posted the list of 1,165 keywords to his blog. Some of the terms appear correlated to the prizes; the terms "Starbucks," "Starbucks locations," and "Starbucks gift card" likely all refer to the Starbucks Gift Card prize. Other keywords, such as "iconoclast," "placenta," and "Ludwig Mies van der Rohe," a 19th-century German-born modernist architect, are more cryptic.

Some bloggers took cracking the contest a step further. Theadwatch.org poster "Enndot" developed an application that sent the winning prize keywords to the MSN search engine automatically, and then clicked on the prize link if and when it appeared. According to Enndot, after 4,122 clicks on the prize link, he received a prize page for a Home Depot gift card.

MSN declined interviews on this topic, but released the following statement from Kai Ichikawa, the group's product manager: "We are happy to see the enthusiasm around the MSN Search and Win campaign. We have confidence that we have successful measures in place to weed out any potential fraud. There are many opportunities to win and we encourage customers to search and win on MSN Search."