HomeAdvisor.com Receives “Gold Star” From Yahoo! Internet Life For Best Overall Home-Buying Site

REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 26, 2001 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that the HomeAdvisor.com™
online home and real estate guide from MSN has been named the best overall home-buying site by Yahoo! Internet Life’s annual Gold Star site review. By winning both the overall award and each of the four primary categories — Listings, Tools, Research and Extras/Caveats — HomeAdvisor made a clean sweep in the Yahoo! review and reinforced its place as the leading house and home site on the Web. The award comes just weeks after the site’s third straight Best Home Buying Site award from Gomez Advisors Inc. and caps a string of record traffic months for HomeAdvisor.

Praising HomeAdvisor’s unparalleled interface, easy navigation and useful consumer tools, the Yahoo! Internet Life review ranked HomeAdvisor.com best in its class. Extensive nationwide home listings propelled HomeAdvisor into the top spot, as Yahoo! reviewers found the site produced more homes for sale than competitor sites in nearly every search performed. Integrated mapping of comparable home sales, helpful e-mail alerts and in-depth tutorials furthered HomeAdvisor as the Best Overall Home-Buying site.

In addition to winning recent industry awards, HomeAdvisor.com has experienced a 70 percent increase in traffic over the past three months, making it the fastest-growing real estate portal on the Internet. This surge has sent traffic numbers soaring to nearly 4.5 million visitors per month, as well as more than 5,000 customer leads a day to real estate companies with listings on HomeAdvisor.* Additional site enhancements in the coming months will continue to demonstrate HomeAdvisor Inc.’s commitment to offering the most complete selection of consumer tools and resources for everything about the home.

“We are extremely excited about yet another significant win,”
said Ian Morris, product unit manager for HomeAdvisor.com at Microsoft.
“Objective third parties agree: HomeAdvisor is the best home-buying site on the Internet. The Yahoo! review along with a 70 percent traffic increase and three consecutive Gomez scorecard wins contribute to the ever-increasing industry and consumer support and praise for HomeAdvisor.com.”

About HomeAdvisor.com

HomeAdvisor.com is the Internet’s most complete guide for finding everything about the home, combining Microsoft® technology with services and expertise from the most-trusted names in the real estate industry. HomeAdvisor.com helps consumers address every home-related decision, with fully integrated content and services ranging from buying and financing to improving and maintaining a home. Named Best Online Home-Buying Site on the Web three consecutive times in the Gomez Summer, Fall and Winter 2000 Internet Home-Buying Scorecards, HomeAdvisor.com was also named Best Overall Home-Buying Site by Yahoo! Internet Life, is a winner of the Inman Innovator Award as the best residential real estate site, a PC Magazine Top 100 Web site and a Family PC Web Site of the Month. Part of the MSN network of Internet services, HomeAdvisor.com launched in July 1998 and can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.homeadvisor.com/ .

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.

* As measured by Pricewaterhouse Coopers

Microsoft, HomeAdvisor and HomeAdvisor.com are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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