New MSN Search is LIVE

We are seeing a rollout of MSN new search

[drdsl2000]

continued from: [webmasterworld.com...]

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It looks like it might be tied into their lateset Windows update.

Results look very good so far, Look out Google!

AND THERE WAS THREE

The Dr

[RobinK]

2by4, That is exactly what we are seeing. I too am hoping some more tweaks happen so that they are getting to the correct landing page.

[mikec]

i'm just curious...some of you are seeing an increase in referral, but are any of them converting? i'm sure a few sites have seen a bunch of hits from me, but that's because i've been busy figuring out what spam techniques they've been using to rank. Alot of developers using the engine and seeing what results come up and what they look like. Are any of them actually customers? I had sites ranked well in the old msn and to be honest the traffic we got from them wasn't really anything to write home about.

[grelmar]

Into my third day of "spike" traffic on a content site.

Traffic: 2x normal
Pageviews: 3x normal. (People are actually reading through the site instead of just hit and walk traffic).
ADsense: 1.5x normal. Not much extra money.

Too soon to say if it's a trend. I've had similar spikes from G and Y on occassion.

[woop01]

Just to clarify my other post, we also had a 404 script designed to change the .asp paths to .aspx and it was causing infinite loops when looking for non .asp or .aspx files. When it looked for the robots.txt file it ended up in an infinite loop. MSN said that was preventing the spidering so I don't know if it was that specific error or the lack of a robots.txt file causing it.

[Dorian]

I'm seeing beta results almost the whole time now.

[silverhead]

Observation: I was reading an article this morning that mentioned ADHD which I didn't know what it is so I go to MSN beta and type the words "what is ADHD" which produced relevance of that phrase at #10. I don't think I've seen it here yet but I've been noticing that the title tags don't mean anything on MSN beta.
Google for same exact search: #9, title tag (cashed words) relevance works.
Yahoo for same exact search :#1, title tag (cashed words) relevance works.
Purely from a surfer that wants information NOW Yahoo delivered. I'm not being biased as until now good ol MSN was my engine of choice as I use I.E and type queries in the address bar.

[silverhead]

I forgot to include that the old MSN ranked "what is ADHD" as #1 with title tag (cashed words) relevance..hmmmm

[csnet]

silverhead, old MSN search results resemble Yahoo results because old MSN is a variation of Yahoo-Inktomi.

I too have found that Yahoo (or old MSN) search produces the most useful results.

Here are some phrases that must be behind MSN's thinking in creating their own search engine:

"Why keep something that works, when something that does not work will do?"

"When users search for an actress name, they are really thinking about cigars and tobacco, so make a tobacco company the top search result and completely remove 95% of sites about the actress from all the SERPs."

"When typing a zip code and the phrase hardware store, never confuse the user by making the #1 result be a link to a list of local hardware stores located in or near that zip code complete with maps and driving directions. The user is obviously searching for manufacturer's sites that include the zip code number somewhere in their site."

"When a user types more than 1 word, unless they use quotes, make sure to exclude any page from the SERPs that contains the exact phrase entered. Other SEs that give weight in the rankings to exact phrase matches are just spoiling the lazy users. It's high time users are forced to do things the right way. Unless quotes are used, the new MSN SERPs must show only sites that pepper their sites with the individual words. Our algos MUST seek out and remove ANY page that uses the exact phrase. It is the only responsible thing to do for our users."

[blend27]

and for the lazy users they should go to Google and in the search box type the 'help' and go to the first link that is not sponsored listing. yahoo results are not acurate at all and they are changing something at this time in their 'ALGO'. For years they would show most relevant resultes, know changes are here. We have a copetitor who has 2 word domain name, website has been up for 8 years, they are in Yhoo Dir, they are in DMOZ and they have more than 150 backlinks, ---GONE from the search results(Yahoo) 2 days ago. instead yahoo shows 10 results that - of the links pointing to 2 websites that are identical no readable text, well maybe some.

[grelmar]

Or in google, type in your average 2 word phrase, and rather than send you to a site about that phrase, you get a page or two of directory sites about that phrase.

And when you go to any of the directory sites, they mostly cross link with each other, so you can spend all day surfing in circles around directory sites.

Is MSN perfect? No. Is it good? No. It has about the same level of crapulousness as the other engines. But it's a different type of crap, so between Yahoo, Google, and MSN, I can find what I want about half the time.

Or I could use one of the half dozen niche engines I have loaded into FF search, and usually find what I want first time.

For the big three, at the moment, MSN is my favorite because it sends my site the most traffic.

As a searcher... Well, I mostly moved on from the big engines about a year ago.