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

[2by4]

yeah, I really have to stop being so darned optimistic, especially when I'm looking at a company like MS. They are predictable, they always use the same strategies. I think maybe I though they'd changed a little because the new search site was done in real xhtml/css, somebody here pointed that out, and it was, haven't checked again. So I thought, oh, maybe they really are going for quality.

They are really only competing against themselves at this moment, or rather against their old yahoo results, which are ok, but not the greatest. MSN will definitely totally kick the yahoo results in the butt when it comes to freshness, and percent of site pages indexed, although google still leads there, but I don't think they'll lead that for long unless they get their systems working, upgraded, or whatever they need to do, asap.

[mikec]

i'm not saying that msn will lose any marketshare. Rather I'm saying that they are losing a valuable opportunity to start off on the right foot. to be honest i think yahoo's results have gotten much better as of late. their apparent policy of only including the domain name and not hundreds of inner pages seems to actually work on cutting down spam. Not that i'm saying it's a good policy, just that I see it having one good effect. I dunno though maybe i'm just not searching for the right things on it.

[Liane]

Yikes! Try searching for a map of something. Not a huge country like the US or Argentina ... pick somewhere small. I did and got "site" maps for about 2/3 of the first page results. Come on MSN ... that's pretty basic stuff don't you think?

Also noticed they don't seem to use any sort of stemming which is one of the reasons Google is so far ahead of everyone else.

I think they still have a very long way to go. However, I'll wait until they roll out the real deal. I just hope this isn't "it"! :(

[jrzero]

[blogs.msdn.com...]

[inbound]

Here is the clincher for MSN search... The next release of Windows.

Who knows what MS has in store for the search functionality of the near future but I'd bet that integration with the OS will seal the deal with MSN being the benefactor.

We are not 'normal' members of the public, anyone who is and finds they have a little box in their office document that gives them decent results (and I mean once the have ironed out the problems) for information that they need immediately is going to click that rather than open a browser and then type it in.

Imagine this....

Person is typing sentence 'The turnover of Blah Industries for 1999 was' and needs the figure, what do they do? If there is a button that answers their need for information then they will use it. I know that getting suggesting the correct document isn't easy but the general public are fairly useless at forming search phrases so why couldn't an automated system build a query similar in quality to the average user?

[steveb]

Personally I'm not harsh about MSNsearch as an early beta product. It has positives and obvious negatives. The pumping that people do to release this beta as a done deal is what is ludicrous. If Microsoft were to be as dumb as the boy-who-cried-wolf pumpers desire, it would be the market that would treat them harshly.

Some testing the rest of this month, two or three more major algorithmic changes, more complete indexing of quality larger sites, an addition of some sense of niche authority, kicking the blog spam and domain name addiction... and this could be a great engine in two to four months.

Hopefully something like that is what will happen, not some crazy premature birth.

[csnet]

I am getting MSN beta results from the main MSN home page search now.

Here's a demo or the world's worst search engine ever:

[csnetserver.com...]

I have left "beta." in the beta search URLs in case MSN wakes up and realizes how bad theirs SERPs are, and restores their old (read usable) search to their main MSN home page.

None of the sites above are commercial, they are just historical authority sites in a "pop culture" sort of way. lol

[maximillianos]

I only see the new beta results when I am using Firefox. If I cutover to IE, I see the old results. So this is definitely a small scale test they are running.

Regardless, I like it! At least from a site placement perspective and increase in revenue! ;-)

[RichTC]

At the end of the day, love or hate the new MSN search, fact remains that Google have 100% lost their way anyway.

Without any quality alternative MSN will clean up with this search engine.

Users will not be going to MSN and saying "Oh i cant find what i want, i will try google" more likely they will be saying " MSNs better than it was, no point trying google because it only brings up directory, old out of date sites anyway"

[webhound]

Steveb:

Couldn't agree more. They need a couple more algo tweaks on this thing before making it live permanently.

Making it intermittently live is a good way to get more feedback, but I think it needs a little more work before making it permanently live.

Good to see them working on it though. Death to Google. :-)