Forum Moderators: mack
What is the beta? As WebGuerilla has pointed out the beta is an evolution of our Technology Preview. As you can tell we made major enhancements to the user interface and added a bunch of new features. We still have work to do, however, to get [search.msn.com...] to be able to use our new algorithmic search results that are available at [beta.search.msn.com...] .
How does one get into the results? All of our web results are generated algorithmically so you cannot buy your way into the index. We will not try and teach site optimization to you guys – assume you have that covered :) If you want to submit your URL to us you can do that at [beta.search.msn.com...] .
Also regarding relevance, there has been some speculation on some online forums about MSNBot using Google search result pages to build our index. Let us set the record straight – that is simply not true. We respect robots.txt and as a result we will not crawl Google’s search result pages.
With regards to site availability that is something we are continuously working on. Oshoma Momoh, a General Manager in the MSN Search team, posted a blurb about this on the MSN Search blog -- [blogs.msdn.com...] .
Finally some folks have asked why we don’t just turn this on for all users right now? We love the words of encouragement, however, we have a number of bugs that we need to fix and we need to make sure that we can run the service with great performance and deliver high quality results. We will get there.
Please keep the feedback and constructive criticism coming – we appreciate all of it.
- msndude (msd)
That's less than 2.5 months, so I recommend that everyone spend their full attention coming up to speed on beta.search.msn.com.It's very rare to get to see a search engine in transition, because that's the best time to see what the different criteria are for ranking.
Do you see their three sliders? They are for "Very popular vs. less popular", "Exact match vs. approximate match", and "static vs. updated recently." It's really cool to play with these sliders. I'm sure that a lot of WebmasterWorld moderators are off tweaking values to get an idea of how things are computed, and what the relative weight are. For example, if you move the slider all the way to very popular and click search again--viagra.com disappears from the first page! That's a little counterintuitive to me, and it makes for some really interesting speculation about what Microsoft means by popular.
Most search engine optimizers will be fascinated by the ability to play with sliders and try to reverse-engineer how Microsoft is ranking. Not since Nutch have people gotten such a good view at the different components in ranking for a major search engine. Because of that and the fact the MSN has promised their new search will go live by January, I'd get busy playing. :)
Here's one other tidbit I came across while reading this morning. Following on Google and Yahoo's launch of blogs, MSN has launched a blog for its search engine as well: [blogs.msdn.com...]
Highly recommended reading--they've got comments enabled, too. I've really enjoyed playing with the new search, and I'd recommend that everyone spend 2-3 days getting familiar with how MSN is ranking pages--I think the effort will pay off.
If found that post very odd. Not becuase of what it says but who says it. Yeah, every SEO wants to figure out a search engine but it seems like we're being encouraged to figure out ranking criteria for a search engine by one of its competitors.
I thought the standard line was: just build websites with good content and get links to it, the rest will take care of itself. Please don't try and game our search engine, but by all means, do go ahead and game other search engines.
Hmmmm... does not seem like his/her usual self or self of old. I guess that is because there are surely more than one of him/her.
Google was made popular by webmasters and the ability to work with Google to not only produce good sites, but good search results. Webmasters typically start your online trends and by monitoring their behaivor, you can find out what is the next big thing to hit. Google has turned their back on us.
The PR games, the inconsistent SERPs, and most importantly, Sandbox, have turned many webmasters anti-Google. Look at all the happy webmasters who have been dying for an inkling of competition to Google today.
But I hope Google continues on their ways and alienates even more webmasters and web savvy users. They can cash in with their poor SERPs which generate more ad revenue and allow any site in the world to run Adsense.
In the end, webmasters will turn to MSN and Yahoo! for optimization. People will catch on to what webmasters do and eventually Google will end up with the Hot Bots, Web Crawlers, and other search engines that once were "the search engine" and are now nothing more than a 3rd tier engine.
Congrats to MSN for the first step in hopefully some much needed competition in the SE world.
The great news is MSN seems to know its product is not ready for prime time, and are intent on making it so. That would be truly a great thing, and of course many of its current fans will simply hate that since their sludge will be gone then.
Google obviously isn't concerned about the weak beta product, but they surely are concerned about Microsoft taking the time to do their product right rather than rush something so weak onto the market.
Also in the serps domain name seems to be important. Needs a lot of work for relevancy.
But there are too many spammy sites with cross linking and also domain names with lots of keywords in the url. Have just done a search for a popular keyword and the same company has lots of results in the top 20, all with different url's.
Its a start though and the competition is only good news.
To me the difference I see between MSN/Google as of now, is that MSN seems to reward SEO much more. This is very good for white-hatters of course, but there is a lot of black-hat spam in there and it will only get worse. So they'll have to improve on their filters and penalties.
Google on the other hand has been gamed for years and instead of trying to reach out to the webmaster community and be as "fair" as possible, they've been forced to take drastic steps to combat black-hat spam. PR0 bans, sandboxing, etc. In their defense they have not had much choice because their algo was so gamed.
To me, the difference is going to come down to which engine can reward the white hat SEO best while also penalizing the black hat the most, and neither of these engines do that.
Google needs our cooperation, and needs to embrace the white-hatters. They need to put in place a better system for arbitration for banned/penalized websites, even if it's paid. They need a clearer set of dos and don’ts.... and they really need to take a hard look at their penalties and make sure that they aren't penalizing innocent white-hatters... this will also indirectly decrease black-hat spammers since people won't be forced to go that route to make an honest buck.
It will be interesting to see..... as much as I hate M$ I am really rooting MSN to succeed, competition is very healthy.
I did however find several bugs (which I reported) and some junk search results ... also reported.
Things like site maps still come up in searches for maps which happened in the last Beta test and was also reported then.
Some very spammy sites are cluttered at the top of the search results in some (but not all) searches. I also found some completely irrelevant sites listed for searches which had nothing to do with the search. I agree with MSN Dude ... they're not quite ready to roll this out yet, but they are certainly getting close! ;)
The biggest problem I had was (I think) a Mac problem. The top three search results are obscured by a heavy blue background. Also, several times the search results were so far down the page that I had to scroll to find them.
... but overall, I think they are likely to give Google a run for their money. Nice to see some real competition out there!
I had a site that suddenly got indexed really well one day and got a huge amount of traffic from google which used up all my bandwidth. So my host replaced all my pages with a page that said "This customer exceded it's bandwith limit" And in one day that site was completely dropped from the google index.
Come on, that's not Googles fault, but your host's. What he did to you is sabotage to your site. He should have called you before pulling the plug.
Google.com is coming up on a lot of searches.
I guess that the habit of linking to Google's search results using the keywords as anchor text is the reason for that.
If that's the future algo, we'll spamm the living lights out of you with x-linking
And as a result, I find beta.search.msn.com much more receptable to search engine spam than the .co.uk or other specific country domains.
Some searches that only show garbage on the .com site actually have quite relevant quality results on other domains.
That said, I will most certainly stay out of the .de domain. At least for the keywords I'm after.
If that's the future algo
I very much doubt it - that's the point of BETA. I honestly think we'll see an improvement as they tweak and then re-tweak the working model.
M$ are not so silly they'd put anything live if ridicule or failure was the first word that came out of every journalists pen....
The link networks and doorway pages I think will be reduced as this process happens - so I for one will not be touching anything on my pages until I know what I am playing with.
Wolf in sheep's clothing is a phrase that springs to mind....
Not at all impressed with the search results. Did a city specific query and got irrelevant results.
A search for our country keyword gave very poor results We are currently in sixth place in Google (out of 128 million), and have the best Alexa ranking in our category (no spam ranking of less than 10,000). We are not even in the top 90 results on MSN. there is no spam in our category, so the results are just bad.
Instead, at No 1 there is an unknown, new, poorly trafficked site in the top position (a forum with 67 reg. users (we have 20,000!)) and the first three SERPS appear to only have basic sorting.
I think the sliders are useless because most normal users wont use them.
It's still early days though so I am sure it will get better...
I very much doubt it - that's the point of BETA. I honestly think we'll see an improvement as they tweak and then re-tweak the working model.M$ are not so silly they'd put anything live if ridicule or failure was the first word that came out of every journalists pen....
This may be standard Microsoft procedure. Get a buggy version 1 out there ASAP and then spend the next three years fixing it.
First off the serps look great in the categories we monitor. Not alot of crap template spammy sites, certainly no more than Google or Yahoo. So in my opionion its not the quality of the serps thats holding them back at this point. It would appear to be more of a technical nature, ie. getting it to work consistantly across all browsers, and other technical issues that need to be sorted.
I would like to point out that I am annoyed that the press and Microsoft has called this a "launch". I don't know about the rest of you, but my definition of launch is not putting an updated version of the techpreview up on a differnt URL. Launch to me means it would be integrated into the MSN search, LIVE, or at least have a way for normal users to get to it. Currently the only way to look at the beta is to know the url. So I suspect again it will only be us webmasters looking at it instead of normal users. Right now all the people that have read the press releases are thinking, great lets check out MSN and will instead be looking at Yahoo results. Doesn't make sense to me.
Anyways rock on MSN. I can't wait for this to actually go live and for there to be some competition to Google and Yahoo finally. :-)
They are definitely improving, and they look great for my wallet, but I wouldn't use what they currently have running to try to find something.
Bingo. Judging from the replies in this thread and what I've seen you are spot on. It looks like most of these replies could change "these SERPs are great" with "we rank high in these SERPs".
I'm in the same boat, we rank much higher in the SERPs with MSN Beta. However, there's a reason some sites rank higher than us on Google, they SHOULD rank higher than us.
You have to be realistic, and patient. You can't honestly expect the SE of your dreams pop up this quickly. It's called BETA for a reason, and I'm sure things will be better in the future.
On the other hand, we previously had a page rank of 5 on a very important generalized search phrase and dropped to 40 something on the new beta test. Not so good.
It seems to me the new MSN search is using actual text or page content more than page relevance. But I may be prejudiced because I'm an on-line merchant, not an educational site. . . .
However, there's a reason some sites rank higher than us on Google, they SHOULD rank higher than us.
What is it they're doing that you're not able to?
I don't see them as a serious competitor to Google
But is that the whole point - they are hardly going to put out a 95% completed product for us lot to look at (and more importantly Google and Yahoo) and crack for SEO so we make a load more money (although that would be nice ;) )
I agree there is some way to go - but they are surely holding some back so that when 100% ready they can go live with a search engine that befits the name.
BTW - MSN - why not buy searching.com? It's for sale I think (and no it's not mine)
Thanks...
