MSN Search SERPs Latest Changes: What's Good and What's Bad?

[mfishy]

Never seen such garbled up nonsense, not "spammy" per say, but generally irrelavant and just bizarre. Someone pushed the wrong button over there.

Search for <snip> - 9 of the top 10 is <snip>.com....almost all serps seem to look pretty much this way...url only titles and just poorer than ever.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 7:34 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2006]
[edit reason] I bet even <snip> itself has bad results ;) [/edit]

[caine]

certainly interesting.

can see what you mean. looks easy as hell to spam.

[Dayo_UK]

>>>Msn broke last night

When was it not broke?

The level of deep crawling for a site is pathetic.

Hmmmz - looks like sub-domain spamming might be the way around from your example though.

[mfishy]

It was never excellent, but now it is really just buggy. Url only listings all over the place and the serps....well....i don't recall seeing anything like these on any SE before :)

[mfishy]

LOL, i searched for a certain poker game and the query returned "Were you looking for (poker game) near San Antonio, TX?" .....errrr....I live in NY? As a good friend just said, msn is now worse than gigablast :)

[zeus]

OHH danm the results are bad, it looks like 1999 search results, many free hostings, subdomains, non related results, what happend, it bagan to look real good 3-6 month ago, but yesterday it went bad big time.

[Dayo_UK]

>>>msn is now worse than gigablast

Always has been IMO - the Kosmix search engine which was discussed at WebmasterWorld a few days ago is a lot better than MSN in a lot of ways too.

[crobb305]

Seems like subdomain spam doubled. First page of results is often all subdomains with the same spammy title.

Are they ever going to fix this?

[agraddy]

Somebody definitely threw some kind of switch last night. When I went to bed everything was normal (other than the new look with the search bar at the very top). When I got online today, I checked some terms I have been watching lately and everything has changed...IN A VERY BIG WAY!

One of the terms I am watching is large-city widgets and the first time I searched it I was told there were not any results! I tried it again and it has over 100,000 results.

What in the world is going on over there?

[incrediBILL]

I lost my #4 spot on my main keyword but I can't say I'm completely unhappy about that as I now outrank my nemesis on local search, he was always ahead of me before and now he's way lower, and THAT's where the money is.

The only bizarre thing is when you search for my domain MSN uses the DMOZ description which is really really old and I couldn't get those so-called editors to ever update it.

[zeus]

I dont get it, how can they make SUCH a big change without testing the results first, they must see that what they did yesterday was wrong and then redo that, how can they let these results get online.

[MLHmptn]

With these results I can understand why Bill wants to pay people to use their search engine! Even during beta stage the results were better than this. I honestly have never thought the results to be bad until now. This is absolutely horrendous MSN!

[sugarrae]

God... awful...

[MLHmptn]

Sorry MSN, but I have to remove MSN search now from my site. Sending my visitors to use MSN search now is like sending them to someones MySpace.

[engine]

Let's try to be constructive!

Have you seen any new pages listed, and have you looked at some of the pages that are doing well to find out why?

[Kufu]

Man oh man!

That is truly awful.

Gates said (in late '05):

"Now, in a very short period of time, we will actually have more than matched the kind of relevance that Google can deliver. The role of Microsoft Research in that has been phenomenal."

Ha ha. :)

[CritterNYC]

Wait. Someone is still using MSN? To actually search for stuff? AND expecting good results?

[Dayo_UK]

>>>Let's try to be constructive!

Hmmz - hard, we have given feedback to MSN before and they dont take action.

Let me see - I suppose they crawl ever so slightly deeper than Wisenut. Well done MSN - lol

[mfishy]

Let's try to be constructive!

Ok, flip the switch back and at least provide the workd with somewhat reasonable results...

This isn't your average "update", it is as though something went horribly wrong...so buggy and rotten.

[iblaine]

Results are ok. Blackhat keywords (<snip>) bring up spam. The MSN spam filter is far behind that of Y & G. Other searches (<snip>) seem to be fine. I think MSN took a small step forward and there's plenty of room for improvement. To say the results are a catastrophe makes the assumption that MSN results were fine to begin with...

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 7:32 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2006]
[edit reason] lets leave the kw's out - that's close to home for many readers... [/edit]

[MLHmptn]

What are you smoking iblaine? These resuls are far worse than Tuesdays results! The only way I can justify you saying this update is a step forward is if your site went to #1.

And sorry, I'm not attacking you but I think you need to analyze these serps before stating they are in the right direction. Do the search for "cars" and tell us thats the right direction.

With this horrendous algo all we need to do now is get to #1 with one site and then subdomain it to all eternity!

Nobody will compete! Black Hats are going to eat this up!

[edited by: MLHmptn at 6:49 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2006]

[incrediBILL]

Let's try to be constructive!

Kind of hard to be contstructive and take MSN serious when the results remind me of something the original AltaVista might've spit out, it's results are so 90's.

Ranking #1 in MSN is as simple as owning the domain that matches whatever keyword you're searching for which is just silly. I think I could figure out keyword.com, keyword.net and keyword.org without them shoving that as the top 3 results regardless of popularity or authority.

If the new ContentAds have this same level of relevancy then Google has nothing to fear besides MS muddying up the marketplace.

Oh yeah, the other disturbing thing I'm seeing is technorati ranking everywhere for a technorati tag word so kiss 4 of the top 10 spots goodbye when DOT com net org and technorai have them tied up.

Silly, just silly.

[jo1ene]

That's funny... A few websites I follow don't come up for their site name, but the privacy policy or contact page comes up instead. Site name is the domain name too.

[Dayo_UK]

jo1ene

MSN have always had a problem in this area.

Well basically MSN has always had a problem in returning the most relevant page for a search - which is not a good sign for a search engine really.

[zeus]

I think that is the first update where 99% of the posting are negativ, for the new results, I think there where close to a good SE, just a few weeks ago, but now, it looks like a home made SE.

[MLHmptn]

They've got to be terribly wrong because this MSN forum has never had a thread build up this quickly in such a short timeframe. And to answer mfishy's original question...I can't tell you what is good but I can certainly tell you the bad.

[sugarrae]

>>>Ok, flip the switch back and at least provide the workd with somewhat reasonable results...

Ditto.

[robzilla]

I'm seeing a lot of <snip> popping up high in the results. Search for [life insurance] and you'll see what I mean. A search for [downloads] brings up some hilarious results on the first page.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 7:33 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2006]
[edit reason] lets leave the specifics out. please...sorry... [/edit]

[mfishy]

Hehe, i rarely post here, (if ever)? But do check in here and there as msn brings some traffic and decent conversions. However, I really wasn't looking for the old, spam/no spam, yada yada, i was being serious when I said I think their search product is flat out busted. It is so bad right now it hurts my eyes to look at. And, yes, it does remind me somewhat of altavista 8 years ago...

We all know msn is in its infancy as a search engine, but just YESTERDAY they had somewhat useful results. I have to believe that the software is somehow flawed as this cannot be what they were hoping to achieve.

Man, i wish we could post examples of searches. It's a comedy show out there. Someone should probably be fired.

[Dayo_UK]

I have got to agree with iblaine - MSN results have been horrible for a long time - probably since they went live.

I suppose with this latest update it has come to the attention of more folks here.

Rolling back to last Tuesdays results or whatever does not really fix the underlying problems MSN has with ranking, crawling etc.

This sub-domain problem is just one of many problems MSN has.