Forum Moderators: mack
[beta.search.msn.co.uk...]
[beta.search.msn.com...]
These are giving really nice results, slightly different, as per local version of the last techpreview.
Article by the BBC suggests full launch next month.
[news.bbc.co.uk...]
Is everybody trying it out and blown up their server?
I certainly hope it provides better results than at present since their current technology seems to know nothing about authority pages because when searching for "trade specific widgets" it results in a big fat ZERO.
I would have thought that the amount of spidering that has been done in the past few months would have resulted in some kind of improvement.
The results looked broadly similar to the techpreview
we have been looking at (I am glad to say), with some differences between the .co.uk and .com versions I was looking at.
Is everybody trying it out and blown up their server?
Yes. They're running it on IIS with ASP. Not a great ad for MS technology. :-)
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 -- Microsoft-HTTPAPI/1.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Set-Cookie: SFORM=QBRE2; path=/
Set-Cookie: SRCHUID=V=1&GUID=nnnn; expires=Mon, 20-Jul-2015 23:59:59 GMT; path=/
Set-Cookie: SRCHSESS=GUID=nnn4&FLT=msn&TS=nnnn; expires=Thu, 11-Nov-2004 15:24:23 GMT; path=/
Interesting three cookies it sets. The one called SRCHUID has an expiry date in 2015 - looks like they'll be aiming to log the searches by a user over a very long period.
What I also found were some other excellent widget associated sites which are not normally listed very high in Google and not at all in Yahoo unless you look past 100 or so. There also seemed to be a lot fewer spammy directory sites which obviously helps too.
And then...it went off-line again...!
Me too. I am the first page most of the time but near the bottom, the opposite of what I am used to.
Searched "local widget maker". Got a site from the other side of the contentent. Only occurence of "local" on the page was in the select list of the form which was the page - it was a "contact us" page.
Well, OK, I entered "widget maker" and clicked on "near me". Now, I'm on the US West Coast, but the bulk of the results are from the East Coast or Rocky Mtn States!
Then I discover that one of our sites is #1+2 of 11 million. Unfortunately, it is in a totally unrelated industry area, one where we are now competing against makers of deodorant.
Another site is ranking quite well for geography and history terms, but of course this is not its niche.
Main site that ranks pretty well in both G and Y is buried...
This should be a fun ride.
WBF
Seems odd that they wouldn't link to it from somewhere on MSN.com...
Dear Mr. Gates
You should have kept the 100 mil and continued to use your current search engine. Just my opinion, but from what I can see of your new search service, it sucks.
