MSN Search Preview

when did this start ?

[jimmykav]

I got a referal from MSN which i decided to check out at random.

After copying the log entry into the browser I got a preview image of six pages which matched the result.

See here for additional
[search.msn.com...]

[makemetop]

I've been seeing it for around 6 months. However, it only worked on 1 of my PCs (for some strange reason). About 48 hours ago it started working on all of them. The spider for the images comes from Girafa - you can have some fun looking for redirects and cloaked sites using it. Makes inelegant (spammy?) SEOd sites stick out like a sore thumb!

I made a posting somewhere when I first found it - but I couldn't find anyone else who could see it too.

It is produced by someone ticking a check box on the MSN search box called by IE. You can see it if you do a search and when the results come up on the left, you scroll down to the bottom. It seems that the default is now to switch the preview on. I don't think this was there a few days ago.

[jdMorgan]

Ahhh... So that's where Girafa was going... At first it was a "toolbar" setup, so I didn't
take it too seriously, but if it's now integrated into the IE's MSN search function, it may be
worth watching.

I wrote an e-mail to Girafa when I first saw their spider, informing them that a lot of
webmasters would block them if they didn't include any contact info in their User-Agent string.
Much to my surprise, I got a response within 24 hours. And a few days later, the UA had the
contact info in it.

A few observations:
1) If a page on a site has no graphics at the top, Girafa shows the home page instead.
2) Squiggle-domains of the form www.GeeOhCitees.com/~joebob are not previewed, Girafa
shows the www.GeeOhCitees.com home page instead.
3) It's hard to tell whether this feature will be popular. It undoubtedly appeals to people's
instinctual "shiniest is best" selection method, and it will probably appeal to the "artist-
type" with a highly-developed sense of aesthetics. If they get items 1 and 2 cleaned up, it
might even help "left-brain" types like me - I don't know art, but at least I'll avoid the
really shoddy-looking sites.

Anything else interesting about this feature?

Jim

[mayor]

Don't see it from myself here in the US

[bobriggs]

1) If a page on a site has no graphics at the top, Girafa shows the home page instead.

I'm seeing the home page on all of my sites - even the ones with graphics at the top.

Also, it only shows 6 previews: (so you're out of luck if you're not ranked 1-6 or 11-16)

mayor, I'm using IE6, I wonder which versions of MSIE the preview function works on.

[makemetop]

>I'm seeing the home page on all of my sites - even the ones with graphics at the top...

Likewise.

The initial PC I got this on was/is IE 5.50 and not on IE 6 - now on both.

[Josk]

Is this still working... I'm using Mozilla and nothing on the page seems to work. Hmmph...I launch Windows (via VMWare) and see if Microsfost's buggy browser brings better bytes back...

[JuniorHarris]

Still working...the preview shows the first six sites from each result page.

[msgraph]

[search.msn.com...]

[deltakits]

What's really bad about this is that you cannot see what keywords people type in to get to your site, just [search.msn.com...]

:(

Am I missing something?

[bobriggs]

No, you're not missing anything.

View source on the link msgraph gave and you'll see the method is POST. So no query string.

There was a discussion a few months ago about search engines changing to a post method, then no query strings would ever be seen. Would make an SEO's job much harder.