MSN Search Tech Preview #3

[msndude]

Continued from:
[webmasterworld.com...]

---

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]

[Liane]

Huh? What is everyone so pleased with?

These results are hardly competitive. Spam is absolutely everywhere! Redirects, cloaking, white text on white background all work really well.

Not impressed at all. Results are waaaay outdated, and considering how much spidering has been going on, I'd like to know what they've been doing with those pages they've indexed? They sure aren't in the results!

As for relevance ... not so great IMHO.

I don't think their ready to roll out anything based on these results. Keep working guys.

[Dayo_UK]

Results are waaaay outdated, and considering how much spidering has been going on

The results certainly are not outdated - they are very very fresh. Are you looking at the Inktomi Msn results - now they are out of date.

As to the other points - sometimes I do a search and the results are looking good - other times not so good. Bit like any other search engine.

[aleksl]

One of my sites, when queried "example site:example.com" returns "Results 1 - 10 of about 6,742". Once I go through a few pages it shows "Results 171 - 180 of about 1,424". It also changes total number of pages when I change count parametere to "&count=100". Also, second number is a lot closer to total number of pages on that site then the first one.

[petehall]

I like these results!

Where I look they are fresh, logical and relevant.

[ThomasB]

Just having a look again at the SERPS and was kind of frustrated. I was looking for sth to read and I only got 8 results: "Results 1 - 8 of about 274,969,572"

I wonder if the other 274,969,564 pages were removed from the index because they were marked as SPAM. ;)

[jcoronella]

No next/previous. "There are 274,969,572 results, but you should be happy with these 8"

[iblaine]

The results have improved. Over the summer, the msn beta search showed a bunch of my URLs that are fairly spammy and rank well in yahoo. This latest change now shows those URLs with solid content and backlinks and rank well in google. The difference between the old beta and new beta is almost like the difference between yahoo and google. However there is still quite a bit of work to do with removing cloaking/automatic redirect sites.

[isitreal]

They just turned off the next>>> feature, it wasn't really working that well, only the main page, but at least now the search queries run faster. You have to feel sorry for anyone forced to run a real search engine on windows servers, but I'm sure the search team is doing as well as they can with that restriction in place.

[freejung]

I agree with assessments that results are shallow. While the homepage of a site may rank very well for its main phrases, subpages seem to be nowhere to be found for less competitive phrases.

There is one exception to this, that being a subpage which has lots of off-site backlinks. My theory is that they are giving amazing amounts of weight to off-site anchor text, and significantly less weight than G for whatever they use for PR, and little weight to on-site anchor text.

This is unfortunate if true, as it would take away significantly from the value of content development, favoring small tightly focused sites over big broad sites, and forcing you to get external backlinks for every page you want to rank at all.

[RonPK]

Just a short remark from a users perspective: please don't give focus to the search field on the SERPs. Especially if you're using IE, it makes it almost impossible to scroll the page using the keyboard. Most users want to scroll the results before they enter a new search phrase, so in the page design scrolling should have priority.

[thumpcyc]

Hey freejung, I would disagree with your assessment of the results being shallow. Almost all the keyworks I attempt to do well with, 2, 3, and 4 word combinations, return interior pages from my site and others, not just the homepage of the sites. For The Few Of The keyworks I checked, The top results for most of the terms, are close to that of Y & G, with a few exceptions, in some cases there was less spam than Y & G, other keywords had more, I believe that all would be considered non-competitive search terms.

Thumpcyc

[jsavvy293]

so has anyone noticed that directory sites aren't getting ranked well in the SERPs?

[petehall]

freejung I also disagree with your assessment of the results being shallow.

[webhound]

Yes I also disagree with the results being shallow. They look as good, if not better than what I see right now on Y! and G.

[jranes]

Very good stuff in this index. It looks like there are several great newer sites pages that will only be able to be found here.

[zeus]

i think they are working on something today, the site is very slow and some times you cant see the next bootom at the end.

[tomasz]

WOW, Great index, time to buy some Google puts.

[hotftuna]

"so has anyone noticed that directory sites aren't getting ranked well in the SERPs?"

I own a large, old directory and it is in the index, but not ranking well except by it's name.

[super_seo]

I have to say these results are easily right up there with Googles. Add in the freshness and depth and i just sold my google stock! Launch this thing.

I did a study comparing msn beta and google with 10 internet savy people 100 search terms; 50 info, 25 commercial and 25 personaly relevent terms to each of the searchers.

There was little or no difference in quality reported in the commercial searches, Google had an ever so slight edge in the info search but it was almost to close to call, and Google not suprisingly did have half a step on the searchers satisfaction with personal relevent terms. All in all however most searchers agreed with a little tweaking MSN could indeed be their future search engine of call.

[robho]

The "Results 1 - 3 of about 31 containing..." does look odd, but it's caused by the "See more results from". If you expand the "see more results", you do indeed get the number given.

Perhaps it should say something like "See 27 more results from" to make it clearer where they've disappeared to.

I'm quite impressed by this search. For a really obscure two-word phrase Google has one result, Yahoo seven, Alexa ten, and the MSN new search 31 pages, 29 from one site. It's got a good depth.

But the link text is given too much weighting, as others have mentioned links to a site often come up before the site itself.

Also, sites with many old links using a kw phrase, where that phrase now doesn't appear anywhere on the site, come high on the SERPS (higher than Google, for the phrases I tested).

Some of my sites do better on this search, some do worse - it seems to have a lot to do with the content of the link text (as discrete words, not character strings). Which is probably why hyphenated-keyword-laden domain names do well on it.

[soapystar]

html symbols in meta tags work...no sign of detecting redirects.....

[angiolo]

I agree with Liane:

Spam is absolutely everywhere! Redirects, cloaking, white text on white background all work really well..

Results are very fresh and at the moment I am using this search engine only to monitor new competitor sites and the tricks they are using.

[webhound]

Spam is everywhere in Google and Yahoo too. MSN is a little cleaner than G and Y for the cat's we monitor.

Look forward to the MSN launch thats for sure. :-)

[petehall]

Look forward to the MSN launch thats for sure. :-)

Me too! Does anyone have an idea when they will be launching this new engine?

[canuck]

Well TechPreview_3 just closed early on the morning of October 19th.

TechPreview_4 before they launch? Still a November launch? ...Coming soon to a WebmasterWorld near you...

[subway]

Well TechPreview_3 just closed early on the morning of October 19th

Yep, closed. So what an excellent way to get a database full of search terms that they are going to have potential "problems" with, every SEO'er and their dog frantically pucnhing in their keyterms and sending them to MS! :-)

[webhound]

What are you guys talking about closed? It's still coming up for me in Canada. (946am Central time.)

[reuben101]

Ditto that. Working fine in Central US. Search results are getting better, but a far cry from Google consistency in my opinion. Although, I suspect MSN will win a number of converts here when it unleashes MSNsense...

[RFranzen]

Working right now in Florida as well. Maybe it went down temporarily while they wired up the cache machine? Instead of timing out, the cache link now delivers a fuzzy, overexposed picture (of Faisal Saud?), and the words:

* This Page is under construction, stay tuned!

-- Rich

[mahlon]

This may have been said already but, after clicking on the cached link, I am offered a Google search!