Forum Moderators: mack
What does this really mean? Does this mean that the searchers will see the results that currently are in Beta?
Thank you.
Erku
oooops....
That probably won't last long, but check your positions.
- Larry
Now I am ranking around #30 for the same. This just changed about 2 - 3 days ago.
No new referrals to speak of here..
Did anybody see any increase in msn beta referrals?
I haven't seen anything.
MSNBeta is the only engine to index my little online database (and rank it quite well) so I'm pretty confident I'll notice a spike in referrals when MS starts significantly serving out the new SERPS.
Eg you can do a search for XYZ Widgets and get results 1-10 with no more - and then do a search a while later and get results to 1-1000 odd.
So I am finding it very hard to judge positioning on the beta results - ie how do I know if results are being left out!
Sorry, just a rant out loud that I felt like stating for a long time now. I am just sick and tired of hearing about MSN Beta when they are still using YahInk for their portal.
They've reached the top of the bell shaped curve for pre release publicity and if they don't put it on MSN.com soon, their "blah blah blah (Better then Google) blah blah blah" will start to backfire on them.
The new MSN initative makes sense to get the beta in front of more eyeballs while it is still very uncompetitive. Personally I'd be afraid about that though since their last two major tweaks have been steps back. Still, summer was always the best guess and they are on a solid timetable to meet that goal.
All 3 of them, Yahoo, MSN, and Google are in a Press Release war to announce this or that every week. Just look at the number of announcements that come out every week about this development or that development. They are trying to stay on the cutting edge, sure, but there's also a publicity war going on as well.
I've tried beta, and I'm rather impressed with it. Anything is better than Yahoo! The nsooner it launches on their main site, the better!
I notice that much of the opinion is based on how a persons site is doing, i.e.
well ranked = great algo
poorly ranked = crap algo
Amazingly my 6 main sites all return #1 for their most important searches, absolutely fantastic, I genuinely am stunned. However...
where I differ from many of the posts is that I should NOT be #1 for all those searches! Therefore it is not ready IMHO.
I am inclined to think it is more of an indexing problem as opposed to algo.
A lot of sites I would expect to see are simply not there. Perhaps when these get listed the SERPS will have greater relevancy
Regards
Rod
(Objectivity and Unbiased Ops with the WebmasterWorld crowd? Impossible. Totally Impossible).
Think about it, if GOOGLE were in Beta testing (out of the mainstream) right now, how many people would be saying it is Ready/Not Ready? If Yahoo were in Beta testing, some people would say it's ready/ some not ready.
I still say it's time to sh*t or get of the pot for MSN Beta. Whether it is "ready" or not.
Simple searches are ready, but more complicated ones aren't. I agree with phantom.. if they release it now it's a mistake, have you tried actually using this as your daily search engine yet, not just for testing your favorite keywords? I have, and I can't use it. I can use Yahoo or Google,whatever their faults may be.
Let me rephrase this, I just double checked, some simple searches are ready. It still can't give me the product name / product site in number 1 position for a global product, which yahoo and google both can. There are far too many failures like this to consider it ready as far as I'm concerned, but they will have to start testing it more heavily over the next few months. I think you are reading too much into that blog article personally, all they said there was they are going to once in a while mix in some beta results to test the actual system, the servers etc, with real traffic loads.
It was only a few weeks ago that you could only go more than about 7 pages down into the serps, this thing is still very raw and new. Only a few weeks ago, MSN beta was reviewed by a prominent online computer news site and declared easily the worst search engine out there. It's improving, but it's beta. I thought the first so called 'beta' versions were really 'alpha' versions, it's definitely a beta now though.
"A search engine isn't about publicity. They should launch when they have a search engine worthy of the name. They don't now, and all the pumping talk to get them to release an immature product isn't going to make it mature any faster."
Exactly. When I can really use this product for an extended time as my real search engine it's ready, as it is now, real searches almost always end up with me having to use google, I don't have time to mess with a product that simply isn't ready to go yet.
It will be an absolute refreshing change to see results that are relevant to the keywords requested rather than a list starting with the oldest sites first mixed with loads of directory sites and sites just full of link pages - googles current algo has gone too far and they are now starting to pay the price with poor results
If Google was absolutely fantastic with perfect results every time then just maybe i would agree with you, but the fact is that google is not perfect and imo MSN is already a better search engine and its just at the start.
I think MSN should launch the service now and more and more websites will take notice of it and then MSN can start taking the market share they deserve from Google. After all if MSN produce an exact copy of googles results what would be the point!
There are still a few problem areas such as over reliance on keyword domains and multi url sites.
I'm looking forwards to the new traffic when they flick the switch.
This is all true, but it doesn't change the fact that I can't use it to do routine searches, I don't get the answers I need. You've correctly noted the pluses, but you're not seeing the negatives. First of all, you have no idea if their servers are actually ready to go full scale. I don't either. I'll keep testing it once a week or so, but every time I've done it, like I said, I had to give up, I do complicated searches, and it just doesn't work. What I see is very typical beta behavior, the core stuff works, that's what people here are seeing that make them go, it's ready to go, but what I see is that the stuff beyond the core, the more complex parts of search, are still working in beta. It was only about 2 weeks ago that I did a search on a specific Microsoft software issue and got back pure gibberish in the serps, no answer at all.
Try using this thing for real searches all day, not 'kewpie dolls', 'hotels', or whatever you're using it where it is working for you. I'd like to see it work, I'd like to see it go live, it would have been even better 2 weeks ago for some of my sites, but I still wouldn't use the product, and neither would a lot of other people I think, including the computer press, who have already called it not ready for prime time. I think they tend to be a little more objective about things like that than people who's sites are doing very well in it at the moment. That can change, I had some number ones in MSN last week, they're gone this week. Don't get too excited, it's looking good, it's promising, it's not going to suck that badly when it goes live I think. But if they go live now, I don't know, it's hard to recover from bad press.
What does this really mean? Does this mean that the searchers will see the results that currently are in Beta?
He goes on to say that the service remains in beta status and they will officially launch it when it’s ready.
Clear enough.
