Tamar reported yesterday here that MSN Prepopulates their UK Search Box with "The Apprentice BBC". But it does not appear to just be prepopulated with "The Apprentice BBC". Last night they began showing "Euro 2008 results" in the search box, which leads to here and the first result goes to euro2008.com.

And I just refreshed and I see a third one. This one is for "Cricket World Cup" and looks like:

This new observation seems to me that this may not be a new type of ad. But rather a way to get MSN UK readers to notice the search box, test it out with these predefined search queries. Since these predefined searches are reviewed by Microsoft, they probably have a nice top ten subset. Possibly, this may influence Google users to switch to Microsoft's Live Search?

Or maybe it is a weird type of ad.

Forum discussion continued at DigtialPoint Forums and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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