Forum Moderators: mack
Corp. on Thursday will start its long-awaited Internet search service, adding fresh competition to Google Inc.The Redmond, Wash. software maker on Thursday will open to the public its service for searching the Internet after eighteen months of development. The company is trying to tap into the lucrative business now dominated by Google of combining Internet search and advertising.
[online.wsj.com...]
Pete, you're leaving out some very influential factors, because Hitwise estimates traffic to a site, not searches on a site.
There are many more reasons to visit MSN than just search, whereas Google is primarily about search. Hence artificially spiked MSN figures.
Hitwise uses recorded data not estimations.
I'm not disputing those facts. When did I ever say the search facility was as well used or it delivered anywhere near the traffic that Google does? I didn't.
I pointed out that Google is clearly far better at its job!
Interesting that all these people are already arriving at MSN though isn't it...
I go to MSN and there's nothing about the new search engine - the only place to find it is at the beta site.
So my questions is - is this going live on msn.com today and if not, when is it going live.
Thanks,
Chris
I go to MSN and there's nothing about the new search engine - the only place to find it is at the beta site.So my questions is - is this going live on msn.com today and if not, when is it going live.
As far as I can tell, the launch today is moving their newest technology from techpreview.search.msn.com to beta.search.msn.com. According to Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, MSN has promised to move their new technology over to the main search box by the end of January. That's less than 2.5 months, so I recommend that everyone spend their full attention coming up to speed on beta.search.msn.com.
It's very rare to get to see a search engine in transition, because that's the best time to see what the different criteria are for ranking.
Do you see their three sliders? They are for "Very popular vs. less popular", "Exact match vs. approximate match", and "static vs. updated recently." It's really cool to play with these sliders. I'm sure that a lot of WebmasterWorld moderators are off tweaking values to get an idea of how things are computed, and what the relative weight are. For example, if you move the slider all the way to very popular and click search again--viagra.com disappears from the first page! That's a little counterintuitive to me, and it makes for some really interesting speculation about what Microsoft means by popular.
Most search engine optimizers will be fascinated by the ability to play with sliders and try to reverse-engineer how Microsoft is ranking. Not since Nutch have people gotten such a good view at the different components in ranking for a major search engine. Because of that and the fact the MSN has promised their new search will go live by January, I'd get busy playing. :)
Here's one other tidbit I came across while reading this morning. Following on Google and Yahoo's launch of blogs, MSN has launched a blog for its search engine as well: [blogs.msdn.com...]
Highly recommended reading--they've got comments enabled, too. I've really enjoyed playing with the new search, and I'd recommend that everyone spend 2-3 days getting familiar with how MSN is ranking pages--I think the effort will pay off.
How on earth do they expect to get a true evaluation when only webmasters are taking a look? No one here will think the results look good uinless their site(s) are among the top in their serps, right?
It's really cool to play with these sliders.
It is also fun to try popularity numbers higher than 100, at 1,000 the results are starting to look a little odd, going way off course at 10,000 and by 100,000 results are becoming dominated by yahoo.com, google.com, etc
But the new MSN has it as #1
Great News
I recommend that everyone spend their full attention coming up to speed on beta.search.msn.com. It's very rare to get to see a search engine in transition, because that's the best time to see what the different criteria are for ranking.
Hahahaha...
Translation: I want you all to study MSN's weakenesses very carefully so you can exploit them and bring them to their knees in January.
I'm just kidding GoogleGuy I know you're just as fascinated as all of us, but it's just funny to hear this coming from you, that's all ;)
Interesting that all these people are already arriving at MSN though isn't it...
Depends on how you look at, for e.g somewere along the line one of microsofts products ask the user to set their homepage to an msn site msn messenger used to do this not sure now. User fires up browser opens up default homepage then user navigates to Google. Another scenario user logs out of hotmail it takes them to the default msn home page user then navigates to Google.
regards,
Mark
That would be some competition... Google must be expecting this.
They didn't work very well either.
Both Google and MSN need to improve their quality, not add bells and whistles that shift the drivel around.
I'm sure that a lot of WebmasterWorld moderators are off tweaking values to get an idea of how things are computed, and what the relative weight are.
And bravo for them giving us the ability to do so. As you pointed out, we don't get many of these. In fact, I think Microsoft is quite the innovator here - they're going to tell you why they're ranking the pages that they are. They're the first commercial engine to do so.
That makes sense to me. A search engine explaining why it's ranking what it is, giving you the ability to change it based upon what's more important to you - get this - without complicated search modifiers that no one can memorize.
Many folks are quick to blow Microsoft off here because of Release One search quality. Don't. The search game isn't won on search quality anymore, and Microsoft always comes back for the kill on Release Two.
GoogleGuy, I think you guys may be a tad bit more scared than you might be leading us to believe at this point. Microsoft moving away from blackbox and more towards something being open? Uh oh - better not let the news get a hold of that perspective. ;-)
