Forum Moderators: mack
MSN Dude?
Unclosed paragraph tags would rank right up there in the top things searchers care about :-¦.
If this part of the product is so obviously shoddy -- despite MS's claims to be standards standard-bearers: [microsoft.com...] -- what else are they likely to have skimped on so badly?
The answer is probably the usual list:
etc.
They asked me to comment. I did. The way the pages are built is unprofessional. That's got to be question mark against their ability to deliver a quality product.
A few questions if I may.
How will the index be updated with new sites & updated pages. Will it be a rolling index update, or a type of batch driven, on a schedule(if on schedule, how often)?
For sites that are not in the index, will they be found, via links, or via a submission on your feedback page?
From where did the new engine get its starting point of sites to index?
For my site, it does not appear to exist in the index, altho the link command for my site returns many results of sites that link to us. The site is listed in Microsoft's Directory (several listings), The ODP(two listings), and has a couple of paid pages submitted to other engines via Microsoft's facility for this, yet my site was not included. (No black hat, no robots.txt)
Like the new engine, but kinda feel left out.
Thanks!
Thumpcyc
From the point of view of someone who manipulates search engines for a living, I'm absolutely thrilled.
That's what i was thinking about last night after signing off.
General rule of thumb when launching a new search engine: if the SEO crowd love it, it's not a very good search engine. :)
As a webmaster I'm frustrated. Sites that rank well at Yahoo and Google are nowhere to be found. I always play on the safe site of SEO and never am involved in borderline techniques or SPAM of any kind. Guess I'll just have to start testing for the new results and figure out what works.
I for one say strong work MSN.
Anyway, the results look in general like a disaster.. for my keywords. A lot of sites coming and coming again in the same page..
I wouldn´t worry about the new technology.. it can be better or not than google, the problem will be with the integration in the new windows.
Hopefully Europe will not allow it ;)
Don't get me wrong, as a publisher I love it while it lasts. I found some of my 5-year-old spam experiments in the top results. Those sites are not even in production, just some junk forgotten in dev I thought was deleted!
I did 10 random searches for the log I have and it is pretty unbiased statistically.
The results are awful! Try for instance [techpreview.search.msn.com...]
and the same query in Y! an G. Couldn't MS get a small test on a small focus group first before releasing it to the public t save embarrassment?
It's amazing how people with huge budgets make mistakes that no geek would make working in his garage on the weekends.
EID: f:618926422 - 1041:1041:10004:1059
HC: 71d61b13
I strongly believe that it's for the best that authority sites start SEO'ing and not having them in the results will be a plus for mom n pops who try to compete with them. A level playing field is best for all players.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, kushmania.
I respect your opinion, but disagree. Running a search engine isn't about creating a level playing field for web site owners. It's about returning relevant results to searchers. Apple.com should come up first if someone searches for "apple computer." Yet Apple's home page has zero SEO -- one word <title>, no "Description" meta tag, very little text on the home page, etc. (They do get a zillion inbound links, of course....)
MSN's new search needs to address authority sites. And it will. I'm just surprised that wasn't factored in even at this early stage.
------------------------------------
In business world, you don't seek "perfection" before launching something new. If 70-80% of people is happy, then that is a take-off time. What you will definitely see with MSN is to "launch first and fix it later" type of phenomena.
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so I will pass on any comments about Microsofdt search at this time....
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9
works for me.
I think it would be unfair if they didn't.
Mom and Pop sites should be able to compete fairly with the likes of Amazon, both are no different in that they both sell Apple Computers. Mom and Pop should not be penalized because they are smaller.
I respect your opinion, but disagree. Running a search engine isn't about creating a level playing field for web site owners. It's about returning relevant results to searchers. Apple.com should come up first if someone searches for "apple computer." Yet Apple's home page has zero SEO -- one word <title>, no "Description" meta tag, very little text on the home page, etc. (They do get a zillion inbound links, of course....)
Thanks Pleeker, you certainly have a point. Relevancy is the main objective.But, looking at it from a marketing standpoint (what most of us do). Is it fair that I do nothing to attract or compete for clients simply because I'm the Authority? or even worse get rewarded for doing nothing to attract them.The web changes everyday, 'All' of us have no choice but to follow. Thats why I'm in love with MSNDUDE right now. Thanks SeventiesMartin
Is it fair that I do nothing to attract or compete for clients simply because I'm the Authority?
Well, how did the site BECOME the authority? Probably not by doing nothing.
I would hope that the SE's improve at identifying and returning authority sites. I really, really dislike paging through spam listings looking for basic information.
The idea of a "level playing field" is nice, but unrealistic. In the brick and mortar world, if Walmart moves into your neighborhood you better start looking for a niche. The same is true on the web.
Put work into building an authority site now, and in a couple of years you too will want SE's to recognize quality.
WBF
some of these sites have been online, and ranked well for years.
not too much interlinking, but the one thing these sites have in common is that they were made with frontpage.
anyone else with frontpage sites with this problem?
Is there a blacklist, and am I on it?
Ralph Slate
[edited by: tedster at 10:07 pm (utc) on July 1, 2004]
[edit reason] remove specifics [/edit]
Three observations:
1. Like many previous comments, there seem to be too many listings for the same site. I'm happy with one, myself.
2. In my categories, which are very popular ones, it appears that informational sites are getting higher SERP placement that retail sites; I tenatively conclude that theme/content is being given more weight than, say, pictures and merchandise descriptions.
3. If the above two conditions remain true when the new MSN search goes live, search engine placement for ebusinesses may not have as much significance as it has in the past on MSN, since who's going to search through 30 pages of info for teachers, museums and books looking for something they want to buy?
MISSING CONTROL: lwbody
Beyond the clustering issue, there is an issue with word proximity and order.
A situation which has much improved since my original post.
LOL, to say the least. They just made another billion or two. Microsoft blunders to a degree that can't even be described.
<surprised nobody has said this yet>
This can't be "patched".
I'm no Microsoft hater. I even love Windows. Scary huh. But the Microsoft bashers can obviously point to this as typical Microsoft... the product is simply beyond buggy at first sight. This needs at least six months before it might be ready to be called alpha.
Personally I'd make an extra boatload of bucks because of the keyword-happy in one sector... but then, virtually no human would ever use this mess, unless "forced" by some Microsoft default strong-arming.
Which gets back to the original point. They must be dancing the jig at the Googleplex. They could throw a hand grenade into their own results and they would be better than this msn pukefest.
<and what the heck did they do with all those pages they crawled? 20,000 page sites are lucky to have 150 pages in the index.>
[edited by: steveb at 9:44 pm (utc) on July 1, 2004]
With regards to a release date we cannot be super specific. Our goal is to release the product within a year.
Some people have mentioned or E-mailed us directly about the lack of their sites in the index. At this point the index has about one billion documents in it so there is bound to be stuff out on the Internet that we do not have in our index. When we launch the final version, the size of the index will be larger. Additionally, at that time we will also allow people to submit their URL’s to MSNBot to be crawled.
I also want to call out that the Technology Preview was released quite early; earlier than we would normally debut a product. We are aware that a lot of improvement is needed. The feedback you are providing is really helpful. We are reading what is being written here as well as the feedback that is sent in through the web and will incorporate this as we move the product forward. Hopefully no one will complain if we make it better for Internet users and a little worse for SEO’s :)
-msndude (msd)
