Forum Moderators: mack
Results look very good so far, Look out Google!
AND THERE WAS THREE
The Dr
Why? because many of the "authority" sites in my area, as far as G and Y are concerned, are dated, stale, and suckling off their former glory.
Having a new engine come along and shake things up is a good thing. M$ isn't my favorite organisation around, but that's irelevant. I wish a "Big New Engine" would launch with new algos, new results, and big fanfare once a year.
It would do much to democratise the web.
Any time something as keystone as a Search Engine (or an Operating system, for that matter) becomes too dominant, the tech and the flow of information suffers. It would be like saying 1 librarian gets to determine what books an entire nation gets to access.
Competition is good. Monopolies and Oligarchies are bad. Deal with it.
If a person is too dumb to not be able to be objective, they deserve whatever happens.
You don't see any irony in your comment, do you Steveb...? ;-)
I guess you 'deserve whatever happens'...
Competition is good. Monopolies and Oligarchies are bad. Deal with it."
That's about as clear and concise a summary of it as you can make. You can see this easily on these forums, just compare the size of the google forum with the yahoo or msn one. Google is too dominant currently, and dictate far too much of how you create your pages and content, and everything around that, even though they always say, make it for the visitor, not the search engine, which if you followed that rule you'd be doing pretty poorly as a rule. Maybe with 3 real search engines, plus any others that might hopefully come along, we can now actually focus more on this, and less on what's wrong with any one particular engine this month.
"If a person is too dumb to not be able to be objective"
That's a tricky statement, sometimes I like steveb's postings, sometimes not, but today it really looks like he's not having a very good day. Very few people are able to be 'objective', it's a talent you don't see very often, and may not even be technically or humanly possible. Some, many, dumb people are much better at being objective than many smart people, simply because they don't let ideas get in the way of seeing what's in front of their noses.
M$ with its financial power can easily break this entry barrier and "provided" they further improve their algorithm to fight spam and recognize quality content, they will have what is required to take Google head-on.
I use Google, mainly for the reason that it has the freshest data, not mainly because it has the best ranking algo. Sandbox? You can deal with it by using creative search terms, such as allin...
Mc
Sites from different countries mixed up together even with a specific country search.
Keyword stacked domain names take precedence over better sites.
Not good and will lead to MSN going downhill.
All those who say it's fresh and fastastic are probably those with poor or average sites who have been bumped to the top above the better sites under this ridiculous algo.
No more money into Overture from me.
Which is why very few people control most of the Internet wealth, key search rankings, and valuable seo/marketing power.
<of course there are other reasons too but objectivity is a key one>
Thanks!
For example, in the pop culture field, hundreds of sites simply cannt be found with MSN beta ...As I said, using a two keyword search for an actress ...
On MSN beta, this actress gets only 3 results in the top 10, and the top result for her is bizarre - it's a tobacco company links page with the actress name combined with "cigar". It's gross!
It looks like we are in some same field and see the same bizarre results on MSN!
I also see mainly 2-3 sites on topic in the 1st SERP - the other sites I see are mostly not related to the topic at all. They only contain the words somewhere within but in sites from totally different 'content' areas for strange reasons.
I really appreciate the new MSN for shaking up the market but in my cultural related field it's nearly broken.
The best SE for cultural related topics at this time is Inktomi powered Yahoo!
Maybe if you look for blogs or product related money terms (I should not wonder about this or?) you may be better with M$N!
And if you look for IT problem help from forums you may still be better with G$$gle.
Try a search from the box much lower down the page, not the top box.
I started getting visitors from this today, they are easy to spot as old serps are served by uk.search.msn.com
New serps are served by search.msn.co.uk
My traffic from msn is up a lot :) having jumped from nowhere to #1 (new site but probably deserves to be top page given the content)
Good luck
Search.msn.co.jp is for example still on Yahoo yet.
certain areas, certain browsers
I wet it will move over to beta all over the world in the next hours.
for those asking, "why hasn't msn promoted this launch more?"
Or maybe they trust their usual ways to enter new markets using their well known monopol on the desktop and will set MSNBeta as default search for Joe Average?
the results in beta format are as good / better then the inktomi feed... especially considering inktomi has been doing search only for around what almost 10 years.
COnsidering the enormous task of building a search engine, Id give the msn search team 2 thumbs up... good job guys.
While some who's sites are finally doing well in an engine are all giddy and would love to see ms promote the msn search more, it's not going to happen.
No wishful thinking going on here. It has already happened. I've got a huge increase in referals. I've verified with many people across the USA, and they are all seeing the results. I think they are at least 90% rolled out.
We've also heard from Microsoft employees who have verified they are moving forward, and that promotion of the new engine will begin in February. Granted, it is unofficial, but multiple Microsoft employees have said the same thing.
I wonder if anyone has stats on the percentage of searches done through the toolbar?
have a question...when I type in "site:www.mysite.com" into msn I first get back "1-10 of 3,240"...then at around page 5 of results it suddenly says "50-60 of 1,010"...then as I hit page 15 or so it says "150-160 of 210" and page 21 is the last page of results. So how many pages are actually indexed from my site, and how do I see them ALL through MSN?
I see the same thing, looks like a bug to me. I am in the camp that this is still a beta test. Complex queries make no sense at all. When they go live, it is my bet that these beta results will not stick.
Well now that they are clearly integrating the BETA into live results, does anyone have any idea of the refresh frequency?
Until January 1st, we ranked #8 for an 800,000+ search volume (Overture stats) term and #1 for a wide range of other terms. On January 1st we rolled out a new layout but forgot to include our robots.txt file. By January 3rd, our entire site dropped from the index.
It was January 14th before we realized what was wrong and added the robots.txt file back to the site. January 15th, we were #13 for the 800k term, January 17th - #9, January 18th - #6, January 19th - #3. All of the other terms were back to their #1 spots by the 16th. All of these pages were .aspx files vs the old .asp files we had prior to January 1st.
(all of the above refers to the beta results)
Judging from this one case, I’d say they move VERY quickly ESPECIALLY compared to Google.
I see 2-3 days refresh rate
Sorry if this has been covered earlier - haven't time to read all of such a long thread
. . . and just checked again - it's back! Obviously seeing a spike in traffic from WebmasterWorld members testing :)
In 2 years, Yahoo, Google, Teoma (Ask), and Mama never excluded a site if it did not have a robots.txt file. The assumption seemed to be no robots.txt indicated permission to crawl everything. As I have posted on here many times, several pages of our site have been the #1 results for 2 years on all those SEs on 2 -4 keyword searches, with no robots.txt file. Not a single one of our pages shows up anywhere in MSN beta. So, it sounds like you MAY be describing our problem.
I just added a robots.txt to our root to see if THAT might be MSN beta's problem with listing our site. The file contains some comments and:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
If someone reading this is not familiar with robots.txt syntax, there are examples and a robots.txt file checker here:
Make sure you use an editor that breaks lines Unix style (line feed w/o carriage return). The Notepad editor, like most Windows platform tools, adds a carriage return with the line feed which won't work.
I'm seeing that too, but that was a tweak they put in a few weeks ago, before that the keywords I was following was landing on the correct, key word subject page. Now it's landing on the secondary page. I'd expect to see more tweaks like that in the coming months, so I'm not going to get too fond of any set of serps I get.
(adding robots.txt files to all domains now. lol)
Sounds like MSN Beta's running a tight refresh. Nice.
