In November of 2007, Microsoft released a new service for webmasters who want to know more about how their websites are doing in the software giant's search engine Live.com. The new service is called Live Search Webmaster Tools, and is used to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of websites, submit sitemaps and view statistics about site performance. Both Google and Yahoo have similar tools for webmasters and now Microsoft has followed suit. Just like its competitors, Microsoft's webmaster tools are specific to the corporation's own search engine.

The way to better compete with Google, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, is to achieve more ad relevance and get more people searching on MSN Live Search. During a presentation last week with Wall Street analysts, Ballmer admitted that this strategy posed a bit of a dilemma since users will search more if there are better ads, and advertisers will only come if there are more searches. Ballmer said the company will have to spend about $1.5 billion in research and development to drive better search results.