subway - 9:46 pm on Sep 12, 2005 (gmt 0)

What people like about G compared to MSN is the simplicity of the home page. I know MSN is a portal but my belief is that most people don't read the waffle on your home page (I know it’s ad revenue but you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs) and the search results don't show quick enough, they're not **bang** there like G. I'd re-brand your search facility as a seperate resource to the portal.

If at all possible human check as many areas as you can, accept the fact that spammers will always find a way. Besides no surfer ever searches past the first 5 pages so human editing wouldn't actually be impossible for competitive terms and that way you can really target spammers without harming the little guys making a genuine living. G causes collateral damage to the decent majority every time they try and target the minority. Also, I’d put more emphasis on a sites theme and not a pages theme.

IMO people are no more unsatisfied with the MSN algo / results than they are with G or Y results, but MSN is like an old Grandfather that web savvy users can’t be bothered with (for search). It’s your image that isn’t right, not your results. Most importantly you need to become the Media darling, that’s G’s biggest strength.