MSN Search To Sponsor American Mensa Events

HostReview.com
Monday, February 21, 2005; 01:06 PM

The new MSN® Search (www.msn.com), the first-ever search engine built from the ground up by MSN to help consumers more quickly find precise answers on the Web, will team up with the U.S. Mensa affiliate of the worldwide high IQ society to support several of the organization's upcoming U.S. events as a corporate sponsor.

"As a group of people who enjoy tough intellectual challenges, American Mensa naturally has some pretty high expectations for the speed and accuracy of results delivered by a search engine on our Web site," said Jim Blackmore, national marketing director for American Mensa.

These events include Mensa Colloquium 2005 and Mind Games. MSN will also feature questions from CultureQuest® on the new MSN.com homepage. With the addition of the MSN Search bar to Mensa's Web page (www.us.mensa.org), American Mensa members and other site visitors can get direct access to Web searches and unique MSN features such as Instant Answers from Microsoft® Encarta®.

"We've been nothing but impressed with the new MSN Search service's capabilities, and we're looking forward to an ongoing relationship with MSN."

Mensa, an international society composed of people whose IQ is in the top 2 percent of the population, focuses on promoting a wide range of intellectual, social and cultural activities for its 100,000 members in more than 100 countries. MSN will sponsor Mensa Colloquium 2005, an educational forum taking place March 4--6 in Tucson, Ariz.; and Mind Games, a yearly gathering during which Mensa members test new board and card games and award the Mensa Select seal to the top five games on the market. This year's Mind Games event is April 15--17 in Tampa, Fla. In addition to being the search engine of American Mensa, MSN has plans to feature past questions from American Mensa's annual CultureQuest competitions along with other Mensa-provided information as part of the regular rotating content on MSN. More details are to come on the relationship between Mensa and MSN Search.

American Mensa is an organization open to anyone who scores in the top two percent on an accepted, standardized intelligence test. The organization has more than 50,000 members in the United States and more than 100,000 members around the world.

Members of Mensa attend local and national events, join special interest groups such as astronomy and philosophy, and help out in their communities through various projects.