Questions/Points of Discussion for MSN Marketplaces (MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping, and Windows Live Product Search)

-How is the Marketplaces team set up? What is the focus of the group?
-How does MSN see the future of shopping online?
-Are Windows Live Shopping and Windows Live Product Search competing products?
-If you have Windows Live Product Search, in the long term do you really need MSN Shopping and Windows Live Shopping?
-Is the creation of Windows Live Product Search a signal that merchant data feeds are going the way of the dinosaur?
-Are your relationships with PriceGrabber and Shopping.com only useful because of the merchant ratings?
-When Target or Cole Haan come to MSN to advertise, who handles the account and what packages do you offer? Are the advertisers sent solely to MSN Shopping for sponsorship opportunities and told to advertise through MSN AdCenter to get on Windows Live Product Search?
-Yes, you’re just getting started on AdCenter, but is there a potential AdCenter just for Product Search? This could work off of keywords AND Manufacturer Part Numbers (MPNs).
-Is the technology for Windows Live Product Search completely new or is it based off of MSN’s search technology?
-How is the crawler set up to search - is it a ‘restricted’ crawler - did you prepopulate it with the 100,000 sites to crawl for products? Is it a ‘real’ crawler - crawling the whole web (billions of pages)? [Thanks, Jon]
-How often do you refresh listings on Windows Live Product Search?
-Are you planning on adding tax and S&H information to Windows Live Product Search results?
-You said in the MSN Spaces post on Windows Live Product Search that you plan to offer ratings/reviews, item clustering, and a bigger selection. Will you create your own ratings system or work through partners such as PriceGrabber and Shopping.com? How do you solve the item clustering problem? The nice thing about data feeds is that you can require a merchant to include a MPN (although they don’t always do it correctly) while individual websites you crawl might not present this information. Does ‘bigger selection’ mean that there are many more sites to crawl for products - ShopWiki is at about 120K - or that there are more product pages on the 100K+ sites you’re already crawling?