Forum Moderators: mack
MSN is making great strides in the quality of its SERP's and it appears to me that they are indeed listening to what webmasters are telling them!
Thank you for MSN Microsoft!
In fact, looking at a number of search terms, I have a lot of inner pages showing. That is OK by me, but I wish the relevance was a bit better on some of them.
WBF
Its users like my wife, she has msn as her homepage so uses the msn search box.
When her home page was previously aol she used that one to search.
So to conclude msn get the users that know nothing about using a search engine and are to lazy to type google into the url.
Show me a webmaster that will search using msn and i will show you a vicker that doesnt pray.
Still, removing even 15% of the crap is a solid step forward.
significant increase in results returned for some KWs
MSN - whatever you're doing keep doing it ;o)
dazz
Now, if only people used msn.
I think people do use them. I get lots of traffic for a variety of sites from MSN. It just depends on the topic.
So to conclude msn get the users that know nothing about using a search engine and are to lazy to type google into the url.
Unless you have a million wives, your one wife can't possibly account for the demographic shift at MSN. It's just anecdotal.
It's important to note that this is a new trend for MSN, it hasn't always been that way. There has been a shift. So there are other reasons to account for the increase in women using MSN.
The point you raise about laziness is a good one, but I'm of the opinion that it's Google users who are too lazy to try another search engine, as they identify Google with search the way they identify Kleenex with tissue paper. It's the mindshare game.
But on three of 23 searches that I checked for an automotive search, the first listing was for ...
web hosting.
Show me a webmaster that will search using msn and i will show you a vicker that doesnt pray
RichTC,
I'm a web master and a .NET software developer. I use MSN as my default SE at work and at home. Most of the time i'm pretty happy with it and don't miss google at all. If only MSN could figure out how to devalue junk links from blogs and other message boards...
Try doing a link popularity campaign and quickly you get the results, but after few days you will return on the position you were.
A category of spammer sites are still in the top.
If you have a good network of interlinked sites you can be in the top..
All of a sudden today or yesterday I jump to #1, who knows if it will stay, but I did nothing to change the site at all. No link campaign or anything.
Mondays are my busiest days so it will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow.
But looking again - if you do a search for Red Widget Company Limited - you will get pages that have red, widget, company and limited somewhere on the page - but hardly ever together.
Makes it a useless search engine IMO.
I know others who have seem similar results as well. Not sure if this is going to shake out more or not.
Not really any spammy sites in the areas I focus on, so not really sure what is going on.
at this point in the game they don't offer very much that the others don't do as well or better.
and the whole "we are everywhere and know everything" they have going on is getting worse than M$.
MSN offer the cleanest and most relevant results now (and have done for a while now) IMVHO.
Can't see why MSN are not pushing their search harder, most non technical types can only name Google and Yahoo! plus Google is wide open at the moment..
And I agree on the demo - for the "right" type of site, MSN ranks can be gold. And conversion rates for those "right" types of sites blow the other engines away.
Dah Nah!
A page that msnbot should have left well alone according to my robots.txt
What is that all about?
Ska
However, they still have a long way to go, they have a problem with deep indexing i think. The results are still hopeless on a four string search but at least the one word and two word search term results are useable and now work, which is better than before when it returned results unrelated to anything other than the url!
Just when i had written them off, they come back with this - gives me real hope for them for the future.
[webmasterworld.com...]
I found it hard to believe that my site (a well-respected information site) was nowhere to be found in MSN but top ranked in other engines. I believe MSN is listening to these forums and I give them a lot of credit.
For a couple days MSN achieves the level of a beta search engine, but now reverts back to its more comfortable alpha stage.
Sad.
