Forum Moderators: mack
1. Way too many listings from the same site.
2. Spam:
Found a page at No. 1 on a 2-word query which consists of a single, large graphic. The only text anywhere is in the form of a copyright notice at the bottom, a bloated Keywords META and an amazingly bloated "alt" attribute on the image. But it was created in FrontPage, so perhaps that explains the ranking boost. :)
3. Doesn't appear to recognize the "authority" sites in some communities as well as G and Y. (I'll skip my rock band hobby site which should be no lower than #2/#3 and is not in the top 60, and instead ask how eBay isn't in the top 15 for "auction" or "auctions"?)
4. Seeing some directory sites ranking too well -- similar to Teknorat's earlier post (#10 above).
On the bright side:
1. It actually exists.
2. The feedback forms are very user-friendly. Fingers crossed that the feedback will be read and taken into account.
There are many queries that I've run with this problem.
I agree. Not impressed so far by looking at 10 user searches I use every month that are not related to my own sites.
There are many queries that I've run with this problem.
I am also seeing this.
I seach for one of my keywords and it brought up one of my pages that has nothing to do with thay keyword.
It is also looking like keyword domains will do well also.
Well, I am off to work on thisisareallyhightraffickeyworddomain.com
the first page does not contain webmasterworld.com. [search.msn.com...] powered by Inktomi does contain that as the first result. Seems like a big miss to me.
A thumbnail assessment:
Seems to me something else apart from simple link pop influencing the rankings. Maybe it's on page and on-site factors.
A search for miserable failure gives a curious first result. Anchor text is influencing the other results, but something else is influencing the first result (which is currently 404).
A search for Adobe Acrobat gives the correct result (a page about Acrobat and NOT Reader), whereas Google returns a page for Adobe Reader.
Soooo... I would guess that while anchor text and some form of link pop is going on, there are other factors in there that are being given more weight.
As far as first steps go, this is pretty good. Needs work, but interesting stuff so far. Keep up the good work.
[edited by: martinibuster at 5:45 am (utc) on July 1, 2004]
Observation:
New MSN search seems to favor sites using <h> tags, even if the content is not relevant to the search term.
Am I wrong in this observation?
[edited by: Slone at 5:54 am (utc) on July 1, 2004]
I also notice that the little guy has the ability to rank pretty well.
Mack.
I am not a Microsoft fan (MS-free business apart from some old boxes running Windows / IE for website testing) but the dominance of google, particularly in my sites' referrer logs, is beginning to scare me.
One immediate observation: there's no good visual indication that there's more than a screenful of results. I got the initial impression that it was only returning 15 keywords (on quite common phrases). How about "1-15 of XXXX results" and / or a prev 1 .. 10 next bar?
...shhooo...get that mess outta here before it starts drawing flys.
I am also seeing very optimized (?) pages redirecting to the index page. In other words, how do you spell SPAM?
Given the huge amount of bandwidth that the MS bot has been consuming, and assuming it has been crawling the rest of the web similarly, I would expect that I would see much better results. The little 5-15 page brochure sites offering boilerplate copy do not impress me.
WBF
Donny
I have been waiting to see how these new sites do and i'm just a little surprised. Hopefully they'll do a "more results from this site" type thing so as not to attract heat from competitors that are being burried.
On one of our new site's most targeted terms every site returned by this MSN is very relevant except the first one which is total spam with nothing more than the key phrase in h1 and font 6's with bold. The key phrase isn't in anything else except the title. No meta desc or keywords.
Pretty positive for the first 20 domains of ours i've checked, that's not necessarily saying the results are great.
The strange listing was #3, since it was refering to a link from our (old) banner management system that (which was replaced by a new one 3 weeks ago). Somehow it is giving it some type of high popularity score (not "link popularity") to it for being shown all over the site. Then adding the title and product description snippet of the landing page. Something like this:
Landing Page Title
landing page product description snippet...
banner.managementsystem.com?bannerid=1&etc
Why would it do something like this?
I'm curious to know which one should I use to have look at the future MSN search -
[techpreview.search.msn.com...] or the web search of [sandbox.msn.com?...] These two seem to give opposite poles of results.
However there are far too many instances where one site occupies the first 10 - 20 results because each page contains the search term. Takes me back to 1998 or so - AltaVista born again?
(Not that I can complain too much - my keywords do well :-).
2 pages relate to the search term.
On all of the pages of his site he had.
"search term" in the body of the site.
Right below this he had approx one of ten blurbs related to the search term 2 or 3 short sentences in length.
For comparison this site has one page ranking in the top 30 in Google, (no. 29) and one page in yahoo (no. 16)
For the most part though the results seem really nice.
Some dynamic pages using modrewrite are completely missing (checked them because I know msnbot hit them), along with some dynamic pages that G has no problem indexing.
Some instances similar to an inktomi bug where an external link has been indexed as the destination page.
Only because I'm accustomed to seeing the current ink msn results giving it some weight, page description seems to be pretty much by-passed here.
From the point of view of someone who manipulates search engines for a living, I'm absolutely thrilled.
From the point of view of a general Internet user who has used Google in the past, I'm extremely dissapointed.
I've found a couple searches that give an excessive number of results from the same domain.
Keeping in mind that this is a preview, I'd say it still needs lots of work. Everybody's mentioning a need for clustering. This is something that the new Yahoo was also lacking when they first turned it on, but not nearly to this extent. In any event, I assume fixing this is easy.
Right now the algo seems to be really sensitive to page title and hyphenated urls (I assume this is due to link text), and seems to have its PageRank-type thresholds set similarly to Yahoo, which is to say that on the moderately competitive stuff it's easy to spam. I'm seeing top 10 rankings for stuff that doesn't show in the top 100 in Google, but also show in the top 10 for Yahoo. Some of my pages do much better than they deserve.
It seems to have better duplication filtering than Yahoo does. If Tim is reading this thread, that's something Yahoo still needs to work on.
Neither MSN nor Yahoo digs into page content the way Google does (ie, Google finds stuff that's in the page and relevant, but not necessarily featured in the title).
The page is very clean and returning serps very fast, which is great, and I'm hoping the rest is set up to be easily tunable and will get fixed enough to make it interesting.
msndude - Good to have you here, and good finally to see some msn generated serps.
