Forum Moderators: mack
Get ready for MSN Google! These results appear to shout "RELEVANCY"!
And according to MSN during the Chicago SES they would be launching by Mid-January! Stay TUNED! :>~
Bring the heat MSN and Yahoo! Google deserves the competition!
Wine isn't on the main page so there is no reason to expect it to rank for korbel wine
Search engine is not on google's home page but I think it is reasonable to expect them to rank for this.
Search engine is not on google's home page but I think it is reasonable to expect them to rank for this.
Korbel does not market itself as a wine producer. Korbel does not see itself as a wine producer. It (incorrectly) markets its California sparkling wine as champagne. Its website promotes itself and its product as Champagne.
[google.com...]
[google.com...]
Korbel markets itself as a Champagne producer, and markets it's product as champagne on it's website. MSN is presenting what Korbel is representing itself as. MSN's results are accurate.
The Korbel wine search is a poor example. It's like searching for a directory and expecting to find MSN search.
However, no one has been able to explain to me why a site that has been consistently the #1 site on 6 other top SEs for a 2 keyword search for almost 2 years is not listed anywhere in MSN beta. By "not listed anywhere", I mean that I gave up after clicking through the first 60 pages of MSN beta results.
It is no mystery why the site has been #1 on all the other SEs. These pages are the only pages on the web with current, updated information, photos, and video clips of a TV and film actress, with extensive links to additional resources, and it is linked in by other sites in the same genre.
Not only is no page of the site listed for that 2 keyword search, but none of the other pages on other subject matters in the site appear in the MSN beta. One exception: If I enclose 3 keywords in quotes MSN beta returns one of the 3 pages that contain that phrase in the title, in the META keywords, and in the pages text. Without the quotes, the page does not appear, even though our site is the only site on the Internet that contains that exact phrase in the title, in the META keywords, and in the page text.
The other SEs have no problem finding and listing content the site contains about show biz news, stocks and trading, cats, and music. These pages are all consistently found by the other search engines, but not by MSN beta.
It would be a violation of the terms of service to post these examples on this board. If anyone is interested I will send you a private message on this site with a link to a page where you can click on links to quickly see the results of 6 other SEs and how they compare to MSN beta for 2, 4, and 3 keyword searches that bring up our site on the other SEs. MSN beta never finds our pages with these searches.
This is a current weakness of google's algo. Since google has this weakness, it must be broken, right, the world's worst search engine, etc?
MSN Beta failed to deliver me number 1 to software x, home page, the site is called softwarex.com, the product is called softwarex, softwarex is a single, unique term, like google. This is what I call a real failure, and it's why I can see that beta is still beta.
Google has also increasingly begun to fail on this type of precise test, to the point that I no longer use google to find manufactorer specifications etc, I just go to the manufactor site, then struggle through their weird navigations to find the information.
Personally, I think all 3 search engines are showing huge weaknesses this year, but I blame beta msn least because, well, they aren't claiming to be ready for prime time. Each also seems to have strengths that the others lack. And distinct weaknesses, most I believe structural at this point.
And I'm not the only one, my yahoo/msn traffic is up maybe 5 times more than it's ever been in the history of my site, the last few weeks it's been totalling higher than Google, and these aren't average user searches, they are more power user type searches, which I in the past would sometimes only get a handful of yahoo referrals in a week.
I'm no longer obsessing on google, the power users I care about don't seem to be either, which is a huge warning flag for google if they care to pay attention to something other than their adwords income.
When msn goes live I expect it to be about as good as google was a year and half ago, which is in my opinion better than google is today. I'm already seeing signs of this capacity, they are returning correctly pages that google has been unable to find for almost a year now. But they do have the errors we can all talk about.
Using your own site's success or failure isn't a very good indicator of the quality of a search engine, maybe you've tripped some algo or other, you can't know that for a fact, maybe it doesn't like your style, who knows? It likes mine, what can I say.
[edited by: lizardx at 9:18 pm (utc) on Jan. 5, 2005]
I hate to say it, particularly becuase most of our sites are brand names rather than keywords, but I think the results were more relevent for these keywords back when the MSN beta weighted title and URL to a greater extent. It's hard to get around the fact that sites whose title is keywordA and whose domain name is keywordA and who make mention of keywordA throughout the text more often than not have something to do with keywordA, spam potential or no.
In the example I mentioned, the number one site has the page named softwarex, title softwarex, softwarex is splattered throughout the page, it's selling softwarex I think. But it's not softwarex. And if I followed their backlinks, 10 to 1 I'd find a host of directories with links optimized for softwarex.
My guess is that this is seos at work, it reeks of it, probably a WebmasterWorld msn forum poster... But it's good for peoople to start trying to spam msn before it goes live, that can only improve the results massively.
I no longer use google to find manufactorer specifications etc, I just go to the manufactor site
just came in to read ww after doing research for sparkplugs on my car. google couldn't even deliver the manufacturer's home page when i searched for <manufacturer> platinum copper <car brand> sparkplug application. hobbyists will recognise that these words would all be found in the application notes pages of the relevant manufacturer. the only useful detailed information came from an adwords link in the serps for genericproductcategory.com
anyways, how come the terminology from the google camp is:
msn beta=broken
google=hiccup
at least msn calls it a beta, google just flogs in a new algo on the fly. thus google is in a constant beta state.
I guess you think "too much" = "barely"
Exact match left of the .tld still rules these things (right of the .tld helps far less).
word1-word2.crapdomain.com still rule for word1 word2 searches.
However, in their effort to block a parked domain site, is MSN beta blocking all content from all pages of any site where the home page is a simple menu of links to content within the site? That seems bizarre, but no one has offerred any logical explanation for the exclusions I am seeing.
Is that the problem with my site for MSN beta and no other SE? I have 150MB of content in 1155 files, yet MSN beta, while indexing the site (site:<domain name> works) does not show any of the content in any of its results pages.
Steveb, you're probably right, it's barely. In fact, it might be something else altogether, since I'm still getting keyword domains number 1, maybe this actually is a more fundamental flaw in their algo?
plumsauce, that example is getting easier and easier to find. When users stop using your product which is supposed to give a result because it can't or won't give that result you have a serious problem on your hands. To be fair, that's assuming the site navigation leads to that, more and more this type of thing comes in through forms and drop lists, if there is no link of course bots can't follow it. I've been too lazy to check that out though, is there a sitemap link to the specs page in question, a non-form based navigation route?
<<< msn beta=broken
google=hiccup >>>
the google lovefest just won't go away. Google is a business guys. They are hiring key Microsoft employees. Forget the cute name. Their market valuation is about 1/5 that of Microsoft, and Google wants it to be as big. They play IPO games, they do things that big businesses do to grow.
google's only showing pr4's or better, if this hasn't changed recently, but does the site really have 5,000 low value links out there?
softwarex.com shows only 1 backlink in beta. 0 in google :/
This is getting to be too funny. While you're at it, go to mysite.com, site.com, yoursite.com, example.com, widgets.com, widgetx.com, red-widgets.com, etc and let me know how those are doing too.
you wrote earlier:
... my yahoo/msn traffic is up maybe 5 times more than it's ever been in the history of my site, the last few weeks it's been totalling higher than Google ...
Are you sure you are good in MSN Beta and not in MSN Old? As MSN Old is still using Yahoo or? Therefor Yahoo! goes up and MSN Old follows simply but not at all MSN Beta!
My personal MSN Old traffic is nearly as Google with REFERER:
[search.msn.com...]
(Yahoo! 5 times as Google as yours),
but I have NOT 1 from REFERER:
[beta.search.msn.com...]
My msn beta results are currently very solid. But no traffic from that of course.
If this continues my site is going to have an excellent search engine balance, 50% yahoo, 35% google, and 15% msn.
I'd like to see the google numbers up a little, maybe to 45%, then once msn proves if it can do the job, an ideal would be 40-40-20 yahoo-google-msn
that would lead to a pretty stable kind of traffic, not overly dependent on any one search engine.
