Forum Moderators: mack
++
Remember that the site has essentially no traffic right now. I'd be surprised if it's getting 2-3 qps. Wait till tomorrow and see how well it does when the load is much higher. And even then I'll bet it doesn't see more than 20 qps. Yahoo gets hammered every day with incredible volume. Comparing techpreview to Yahoo is a bit premature.
I just got "We are sorry, the web site for MSN Search Technology Preview is currently unavailable. Please try again later" - at both locations.
It must have taken days to insert that many errors by hand.
So much for being optimistic. These results are simply pathetic, with "pathetic" being too kind.
My god, I can't believe they actually let the public see these. Some folks probably will get fired.
Anyway... line up to buy those keyword-hyphen-multiple-crap-words.kg domains, because the entire algorith mseems to be built around keyword in hyphenated domain.
LOL, and just as I go to check a couple more searches: "We are sorry, the web site for MSN Search Technology Preview is currently unavailable. Please try again later."
I almost feel sorry for Microsoft.
I don't know the backend, but google gets way more traffic than yahoo for its search -and google is faster. So it would seem that traffic is not the factor that determines speed.
So it would seem that traffic is not the factor that determines speed.
I would say in an operation of this size the biggest factor would be traffic management. Making each server do as little work as possible and keeping the cpu usage low.
Mack.
Glad to see someone at Redmond slums it with us hoi polloi ;)
Feedback from a commercial perspective:
1. Fast - dang fast! (even on a cr***py 40kb dial-up connection like mine - posts above not withstanding!)
2. 15 results - GOOD, like it!
3. Looks good in Moz. ;P ... sorry ... well, no not really ;)
3. Multiple results from same domain :( - prefer grouping or "see more results", even when it's MY sites that dominate, gets embarrassing (like *I've* done something spammy, and tedious for the searcher, ya know what I mean? see also 4. next.)
4. Algo seems to deprecate keywords in <meta> to weight in the page - YUCK hate it!
One mention (or more!) of a keyword on page gets ahead of a targeted <title> or <description> mention? (Or is this setting up your PPC program?) ;)
I would have thought the programmers could set the <meta> to x characters and weight results accordingly. That way SEO has to consider the target keywords and figure out an elegant way to write the <meta> copy so it "reads" well for bots and real human eyeballs too!
I see gratuitious keywords keywords keywords pages written ALL over this!
5. Are you going to include a regional search option e.g. web/Australia?
6. Like to see the number of results if possible
7. Looks like the algo has the same problem with XML DTD sites as I've experienced with Google, not in the index.
8. like the site:www.mysite.com.au search results.
9. Not so good for academic/non commercial searches (possibly due to point 4. above?)
Well, that's about it for now. So far, rippa mate!
Hope the feedback is useful.
Hooroo
JP
It must have taken days to insert that many errors by hand."
Huh? 3 is the record? :
----
Line 5, column 6: required attribute "TYPE" not specified
<style>
----
Line 15, column 30: required attribute "ALT" not specified
src="msnsearch.gif" border=0></FONT>
----
Line 151, column 65: there is no attribute "WIDTH"
...yle="PADDING-LEFT: 10px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px" width="100%">
Mc
Huh? 3 is the record?
I'm seeing hundreds. - you don't seem to be counting things like unclosed P tags.
Now the site has vanished to be replace by an "unavailable page" (that wanted to install Chinese fonts just to tell me I can't use it).
The "unavailable" page has the same sort of HTML errors in it.
Domain Clustering:
Many people have commented on the large number of results from a single domain. The lack of domain clustering was one of those tough calls. We wanted to get a product out fairly quickly so that we could learn a lot by getting customer feedback. We definitely got that feedback on this feature! We will improve on this in our next release.
The site being down:
As we mentioned on the home page of the Technology Preview, the site will go down at times.
Sandbox vs. Technology Preview:
[sandbox.msn.com...] is where we will show some of the latest things that we are working on. The search box at the top of the MSN Sandbox page will send queries to [search.msn.com....] These results are not related to those at [techpreview.search.msn.com....] A little bit confusing, however, I hope that clarifies things.
-msndude (msd)
Mc
MSNdude, seriously, there simply is nothing to talk about when *all* the top results are keyword domains, either keyword.tld or keyword-1-x.tld.
It's like msnbot has been out there crawling deeply but stops after it reads the domain name!
Mc
Added - I can already hear a sigh of relief from Google :)
[edited by: McMohan at 8:35 am (utc) on July 1, 2004]
Not impressed at all - yawn!
Yep this is going to get google real worried.
i.e a search for "blue widgets" seems to only bring up sites with the words blue or widgets (or both) in the domain name.
I prefer the results that are currently on msn.com
1. Seen the top 15 listings being pages of the same site.
2. Seen sites that were prevelant in other engines - not even getting a shout!
3. Base URL seems to top out on results, though the page(s) about the term is deeper in the site (something ATW used to do years ago).
KEYWORD STUFFED DOMAIN NAMES HAVE A MASSIVE IMPACT ON RESULTS - forget about brands on this engine!
[edited by: caine at 9:04 am (utc) on July 1, 2004]
I've found a couple searches that give an excessive number of results from the same domain
Make that really tacky. How more obvious could keyword/link text overweighting be, from even the most cursory glance at results?
I'd suggest a "more results from this site" type of approach, with regards to multiple results from the same domains on given searches. It is way too suffocating for your standard user and does come across way too spammy and probably wouldn't help MSN much if they want to get ahead of the competition as far as "quality search results" are concerned. But I guess that depends on which way you look at it...
Also, question for msndude - will we be seeing any type of geo-targetting here too?
:: nvision
Some keyword domains seem to be working well and they could definitley do with just listing one page from the same site.
You can also do a link:http://www.domain.com search
[edited by: TrustNo1 at 9:59 am (utc) on July 1, 2004]
