mincklerstraat - 8:40 am on Oct 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

I got in at [techpreview.search.msn.be...] .

Some initial observations / guesses on a search for a non-popular keyword:

- domain name seems to weigh more than in google - this was reported in the first preview thread
- 'big' sites (authority sites, or sites w/lotsa links) seem to do better than smaller sites w/more anchor text for a very particular search term - that is, compared to google
- my page's cache is ultra-fresh - the content that it shows was posted less than 22 hours ago.
- results pages look a lot more like Google's than current msn - easier navigation ('next' button on msn.com search very small, not nice according to Fitt's law, you know, target acquisition size/distance), more whitespace, larger margins. Color combo less ennervating and more googlish, followed links in default purple like google and not same color as ordinary links as in msn.
Would do better not to use a fixed width - google doesn't either, and a search window is often one you keep small. Msn isn't fixed either, but the margins are much too small - makes for difficult reading.

In the 'query builder', you can enter special stuff to add to your query like dates, numbers, filetypes, and domains; one particularly interesting feature is 'equalizers', I suppose the term borrowed from the audio device of that name, which allow you to select the degree to which certain search criteria apply: freshness, popularity, and fuzziness. Some very, very bad news though: these 'equalizers' depend on javascript which works in neither firefox nor konqueror, and gives very shoddy, jumpy behavior in opera. One would have thought that msn had learned by now that new work should be cross-browser. My nose tells me people who are likely to get this far in doing searches will have to change browsers to make this feature work. In my case, reboot to change partitions.