MSN Search Tech Preview #3

[msndude]

Continued from:
[webmasterworld.com...]

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Steveb: Thanks for the heads up on the cached link not working. We are aware that this is not functional for many Internet end users and we are actively working on a fix.

thanks,
-msndude (msd)

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 11:14 am (utc) on Oct. 12, 2004]
[edit reason] split off from older thread [/edit]

[0l0l0l0]

On that note... sites listed without the www return "No results found." when you click on "See more results from ".example.com".

results.aspx?q=site:.example.com+example

When you remove the decimal point/period(dot) in the query before example.com it shows the results.

Note: 'example' is just that, an example and does not work to show what is demonstrated above.

[Leosghost]

Msndude ..while you are here ..Please take note that on "language of landing page " by "ip sniffing"..you are feeding the 500,000 anglophones who live in France ( with varying degrees of French literacy ) ..And the 5 million Arabic speakers who are here ...etc etc ..

A language interface which you are imposing ...

I presume the same principle applies to all countries ...

Whilst you do this , I , and many others will only use your search engine to see how well we personally have "gamed it" ( not too hard to do at present )..Plus in my case you are responsible for about 2% of overall traffic incoming to all sites from all countries ..allthough allowing for missrepresentation by browsers you probably have 80% of incoming browsers ( lousy ROI in IMO )...
Thankfully it doesn't need ( so far ) too much effort to get to your "page one" ..

[sem4u]

Thankfully it doesn't need ( so far ) too much effort to get to your "page one" ..

That's why I like it ;)

[Dayo_UK]

The main things I am finding is that when you do a search of three keywords or more the results become very poor and the title seems to have little weight.

EG Search for Black Green Widgets will weight documents that have Black Green Widgets anywhere on the page in any order above pages which have Black Green Widgets as a phrase - as the page is about Black Green Widgets then the title is often Black Green Widgets too. The searches I have done rank these type of pages poorly.

Thankfully it doesn't need ( so far ) too much effort to get to your "page one" ..

That's why I like it

I am finding myself ranked for some competitive keywords too. However, the deeper documents and the longer keyword phrases do not rank so well. It is always better to rank on 1,000 phrases that bring 1 visitor than 1 phrase/keyword that brings 1,000. (IMO)

But I have feeling/hope something is still brewing and what is currently shown is different to what was seen at the beginning of the thread.

[sem4u]

Dayo - I agree with you about having rankings for many keyphrases. I haven't had a chance to test less frequently searched for phrases, and I keep getting redirected to the closed UK test site.

I am also sure that they are working on tweaking the results. Why knows - all my good positions could be wiped out come Christmas. I don't think they will be though :)

[hughie]

one phrase i monitor "snazzy widgets" has the same website in 18 of top 20 places, just with a different sub-domain for each entry. All of the pages contain a few words and then some google ads.

NOT very good results, seem to have gone backwards since their previous version.

hughie

[olias]

Ah I'm glad to see it is not just me that can't find my deeper pages using multiple keywords. Interestingly I am also seeing some of my site rank extremely well on single very generic keywords that I don't even optimise for, also one or two that have been long removed from Google!
It looks to me as if they are giving incoming link text and various on page factors a lot more weight than page titles, which means if you are the type that starts by scanning the page titles none of them look very appealing and look like bad results.

[jsnow]

Similar in the area I watch a network of sites dominates about the top 10 of 20 positions with blatant spam. Very easy to do, and there still seems to be a massive weighting on keyword in URL

[indigojo]

search for "www" [techpreview.search.msn.com...] turns up a few suprises. Apparently Cisco is the most....

[gethan]

- Noticed the number of results changes when you go through the results pages. (lower numbers more noticable)
- Looks like example.com can override www.example.com - even though more links (even on example.com) point to the www'd domain name. When example.com is identical to www.example.com

[gethan]

> Msndude ..while you are here ..Please take note that on "language of landing page " by "ip sniffing"..you are feeding the 500,000 anglophones who live in France ( with varying degrees of French literacy ) ..And the 5 million Arabic speakers who are here ...etc etc ..

Please please please! - use the browser preference field! over IP address.

HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE

Many people travel (especially business people!) to countries where they do not speak the language, and take laptops with them - let these people know you care :)

Bugbear of mine.

[brakkar]

Despite lots of duplicate results, i must say that i' m VERY satisfied by msn tech preview.

Lots of spammy sites that shows on top positions on google for my keywords are now justly downgraded. It seems msn search does a better job in prioritizing relevent, high quality sites.

Secondly, I had the suprise to discover that a new site of mine is already almost totally spidered, where google shows only a few page of it.

It seems that msn search is much more active than google, and this is a VERY good point that could get them ahead of all competition.

Brakkar

[reloguy]

Interesting one... search for "chicago apartments" (no quotes). Look at the source for the #1 result. Within a table cell, it has another complete HTML document (with html, meta and body tags!) This site is nowhere near the top in Google. Do the meta tags carry additional weight because they're repeated? Hope they fix that. It's too easy to exploit.

[webhound]

Well good to see MSN is making progress. Results in our category are looking MUCH better than the first beta search test. Irrelevant results are gone, good to excellent sites coming up.

I would say this is as good, if not better than Google results, as is, right now.

Launch it SOON MSN, launch it soon. Stop using Yahoo results. :-)

[mattglet]

Not sure if other people are getting this, but I've gotten a couple of errors while testing:

MSN Search is temporarily unable to process your request.

Please try again in a few minutes.

EID: f:998372645 - 1041:1041:10004:1059

HC: 922c9446

Probably not a big deal, just a heads up.

[elklabone]

One of our competitors has generated over a thousand backlinks on MSN by creating individual sites (cookie cutter) and then linking back to the homepage from there. They're all hosted on the same IP address.

This seems to have pushed their ranking up...

Seems like a serious flaw to me.

--Mark

[vasudevaserver]

I am personally very satisfied with MSN search.

Testing it with quite a few keywords we care for, and comparing the results with Google's, we clearly saw a *much* better screening of spammy sites, and low importance sites.

One small issue is that "msn it" does not sound as good as "google it" ;)

[Receptional]

search for "www"

even though that is an unfair test, I reckon Cisco is about as relevent as anything on that phrase!

I also think the results are looking stronger by the minute. Good step MSNDude.

I did also notice (anecdotally only) that some sites with links from one page sites might be getting a boost, but I wouldn't mind guessing that iterative versions of the algorithm would downplay that advantage as sites start to get given more relative "weight".

Dixon.

[stevenmusumeche]

So is it November 2004 or is it July 2005?

[CarlC]

search for "chicago apartments" (no quotes). Look at the source for the #1 result. Within a table cell, it has another complete HTML document (with html, meta and body tags!)

Boy, that is pretty ugly coding!

Any indication that META tags outside the primary HEAD tags in this file are getting picked up by MSN Search and adding to relevancy? I should hope not!

[Dayo_UK]

Dixon

I agree results do seem to be getting better by the minute.

Results with 3 or more keywords do appear better than a few hours ago (unless I am imagining things)

[steveb]

Among the things MSN will need to address before it can consider launching is expired/hijacked domains. They don't seem to have any safeguards against such obvious junk.

[jgar]

Many pages seem to be indexed.

I have to say, though, being English speaking in France, it is a bit frustrating to get results seemingly automatically filered for France.

With Google or Yahoo you can go to the local country site of your choice - I can't find an obvious way of doing this.

If you put in .com it automatically goes to .fr - this is not helpful ...

Am I missing something?

[Artstart]

is this for real?

spamiest results i've seen in years =)

[BReflection]

For all the big talk comments Bill Gates has made I just can't believe this is all Microsoft has to show for it. A long...long ways to go.

[Crush]

I have got so used to the google results that I think anything else sucks. I would get some thugs to break into the Googleplex and beat up their cheif SERPS engineer, get him to hand over the Google secrets and implement in msn ;).

You are limited in what you can use for search criteria but in gerneral the best sites or the ones who are trying the hardest have the most pages and most backlinks. I see the rudiments of this in these results but it also seems like domain name has some importance as well.

[internetheaven]

Don't know if any of these points have been raised yet, long thread, sorry for any repetition:

1. My 400 or so page site returns "Results 1 - 10 of about 1,418 containing site:www.example.co.uk example" when you click the "see more pages" from this site link in results. Once you pass 130 results though it says "sorry there are no more results".

2. I can't get any of the "cached" links to take me anywhere.

3. I must say that I am impressed with algorithm thus far. One particular market I am in is completely spammed out on Google due to the high importance played by inbound links (of which my competitors have bought thousands from off-topic sites e.g. $1000 a year to be on every page of a free javascript resource site). Yes, MSN is still ranking them number 1 but I am number 6 - when on Google I am number 312. My site is more relevant than the majority of the ones above me on Google as they are mostly Adsense doorways or espotting affiliate results pages. Can't see any of that on MSN ... yet ...

For all the big talk comments Bill Gates has made I just can't believe this is all Microsoft has to show for it. A long...long ways to go.

I'm assuming that comments like these are from people who aren't ranking well in MSN? The overall consensus seems to be that MSN are on track, of course they're not there yet but that is why there is a test. At least they are involving US in their search engine and looking for OUR feedback - don't see much of that with Google and Yahoo, many of the errors we point out in here are still errors in their search engines. Good PR move Microsoft, but I'm sure you already knew that ...

[phantombookman]

It would seem that the battle MSN have to take on is the potential for abuse and spam.
In my area there is little to no SEO etc and the MSN results are better than any other search engine.
The serps are, more or less, in order of quality rather than just baclinks for G and KWD for Y.

Taking into account the views of others this would suggest to me that their system is fundamnetally very good but needs tweaking to deal with those who would abuse/spam the results, not that any of us would of course ;)

[Leosghost]

Anyone here..in these fora ..
SEO,Spam,Abuse,Influence the results of a search engine?
Heaven forbid!