MSN - Probably The Most Bug-Ridden Search Engine

Incompetence - or dont they care?

[Dayo_UK]

Ok - we had a bit of a rush of posts in the MSN forum when something happened to the index! This has quietened down a bit as the people who were perhaps doing well are doing OK again?

But MSN has been a mess from almost day one and gets little attention normally as it is only of interest to those who do well in it.

But it is so bug ridden I wonder if it is due to MSN incompetance or if they dont care.

Here are some of the bugs I have noticed - has anyone got anything else to add:-

Currently I cant get past page 25 of results!

Do a site:www.domain.com search and MSN says 1 of 200 results - hit the next button and it jumps to 2 of 3,500 results!

Pages can appear in a site:www.domain.com search and then not appear in normal search. I am talking about you can see the page in a site search and then search for that page in the normal serps and the results are only about 10 for the keyphrase and that page does not appear.

This last point really means I have little faith in the engine returning correct pages for searches - it can be seen that pages just dont appear for keyphrases they should be listed in - obv. very noticable when only 10 results - but I would imagine it happens when there are 100s,1000s etc - gaps in the index I guess.

That covers the bugs that infuriate me - although others probably have noticed more.

Add to that

the pathetic level of deep crawling

often nonsensical serps returned

sitemap type pages appearing instead of content pages

MSN Search really is in bad shape IMO.

And these issues are the basics - if they cant get these simple things correct how can they handle spam, redirects, sub-domains issues etc

I hate looking at the mess of the serps - and dont dig to deep so I am sure others have noticed much more of these basic problems.

[cabowabo]

Looks like they just did another update, and while it is a little better in some areas, it is still garbage. Too much domain spam - and I am even noticing the click through rate is poor as well. MSN maybe getting searches, but organic click through traffic is a trickle at best.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[Vlad]

Speaking of bugs, is it just me or there is a problem with css using firefox? I saw this for the past 3 days now...

[crobb305]

So much subdomain spam.

[vBMechanic]

They have a CSS Firefox problem themselves on the main search results page (screenshot):

[img152.imageshack.us...]

[dclick]

personally i dont feel its that bad... and do not feel they are incompetent or dont care.

Technically they've only been in the search engine game for a year, as their beta went live last February. Considering the magnitude of the service, its pretty decent... and the serps are pretty good. Sure they are not perfect, but neither are google or yahoos. and although not up to googles level yet, its better then yahoo as far as im concerned. Its hard for WebmasterWorld to get a local site search engine, to perform perfectly, a search engine spidering billions of pages and returning relevant results in a matter of split seconds, is no easy task.

I think they should try to put in some more filters for aggressive blog comment spamming. I've seen one spammer rank for quite a few keywords the past 4 weeks all from blog comment spamming. should be relatively easy to filter. Thats the one thing i've seen working well as of late.

Many complain about the sandbox on google, but few can question, its extremely effective in keeping out spamming techniques such as above. On the one hand you go to the google thread and new site owners complain they cant be found for over a year, and you come to the msn forum and new sites and pages have no problems being found within a few weeks.

Also a new report showed MSN and AOL searchers to be the highest converters and google the lowest. So perhaps msn doesnt deliver the volume yet as google, but quite frankly, all any website owner cares about are how many conversions/signups happen.

I know my applications and sites arent bug free, and there is always room for improvements. But i try my best, and i assume MSN and their team is no different. To call them incompetent or they dont care is not fair at all.