Forum Moderators: mack
i have also seen a substantial change in the serps in the beta.
anybosy else can confirm this?
While returning 20%-30% of the web sites that Yahoo (old MSN), Teoma (AskJeeves), and Mama get, this new MSN returns bizarre sites that may match one or two key words only. Google has its problems which make it miss relevant sites too, but nothing as bad as MSN beta.
Most search engines are smart enough to include exact phrase matches without requiring the phrase to be enclosed in quotes. That's probably not the problem though, as the missing 70-80% rarely surface in the SERPs, even when the phrase IS enclosed in quotes.
This is like "The Emporor's Clothes". I tried for a month to give feedback to the MSN beta team through their "write us and we won't respond" channels. They fine tuned all right. Where before 40-60% of the most relevant web sites are missed by the beta, now 70-80% of the most relevant web sites are missed!
If they keep at it, maybe they can achieve 100% irrelevant results. Sheesh. :-)
Clearly, web sites in the index are being black listed for reasons unknown. These sites do not violate the technical guidelines published with the beta. Sites that appear in the top 10 of all the other search engines appear nowhere in the beta SERPs, unless site:<domain name> is entered.
I have been a MSFT stock holder since the mid nineties and have been a booster of their technology since the early eighties. That is why this search engine beta is SO frustrating. It seems out of character that the company would associate itself with this garbage.
While I understand why this forum does not want to be abused, the lack of any repected public forum where actual examples of these awful search results can be posted with side by side examples of other search engines only furthers the notion that the "beta is going well" when actually the beta is "truly awful".
this new MSN returns bizarre sites that may match one or two key words only
This is exactly what I am seeing. It's almost like MSN cannot tell what the page is about, it is only looking for words - not patterns of words, looking for related words or applying a thesaurus.
This is not a sour grapes thing with me. I have pages that talk about 4 word keyphrases - not money phrases. These pages do well even with googles sandbox, but they are no where to be seen in the beta. The pages that appear at the top have nothing to do with this keyphrase. They just happen to have one or two words of the phrase on the page.
As if they are only looking for one keyword.
By the way, google is still unable to give me in the top 10 the manufactorer website for this search, it's been a few months now with this type problem
manufactor + product name + product number + either manual or specification.
Just shopping junk, forums, etc.
As for the beta results, while I'm not dealing with mega keywords here, the sites all share certain qualities:
clean, professionally generated html
full css
zero error pages
nothing extra in the code.
plus relevant, high quality content, often authority quality. Makes me wonder. Your results may and probably will differ. No bs sandbox junk. I know this will change over the coming months, but currently it's interesting to see what's getting rewarded. Highest number one is for a 1 million result 2 keyword phrase. Only authority type links to this site, and only about 200.
High quality coding and high quality content coming in top 10.. what's the world coming to?
<<< This is like "The Emporor's Clothes" >>>
actually, I'm starting to think of Google in that sense.
Hmmm...
Our site contains up to date news and information about the actress, images, and video clips. The pages use javascript and a common css for all pages about the actress.
Our site is linked by many other sites that are about one of the TV shows the actress starred in.
There is no advertising on the site. There are links to sites where products featuring the actress are sold. Other web masters have remarked "great site", "one of the best I've seen", etc etc.
There are NO pop ups, and links from this site only go to other professionally created sites.
In spite of all this, our site, and most of the other sites that contain information about the popular TV show in which she starred do not appear in the MSN beta search results.
It is a ridiculous situation, but without any avenue for providing concrete examples, I do not see how anyone will be in any position to do anything about it.
This is an outrageous, politically charged situation. What we are dealing with here is a cynical form of corporate censorship. That some apparently approve of it makes it no less dangerous.
Well, no... it's a beta product that basically sucks. Any rant besides that is about six months premature.
I certainly hope you are correct.
Search google for "I want to purchase a bike". Give me 1 site in that top 10 that sells bikes!? NADA...0...ZERO...Excellent results GOOGLE! Laugh!
Now try MSN for the same term..I find 4 out of the top 10 results that sell bikes!
Let's see here.... MSN is batting 40%...Google is batting 0%! Relevancy you say?!
MLHmptn
Glad MSN beta works for you. I cannot post specific examples to show you what I am describing due to the forum agreement. For all I know the actress has been black listed by MSN beta. All the other SEs have half a dozen SERPs about the actress and we are always #1. That means we place higher than the CBS TV network page for the actress on all the other SEs. The CBS page has not been updated in 2 seasons. Our site is updated weekly.
Only 3 results on the first MSN beta results page are about the actress. MSN beta search result link #2 is to a major tobacco company cigarette brand page that in turn displays search results combining the actress name and "cigar". The actress once puffed on a cigar on the show. Some of those links mention the actress, but every link is about cigars, and cigar was not one of the keywords I entered.
None of the other search engines place that tobacco company page in their SERPs when searching for the actress name. I had never seen that tobacco company page until using MSN beta search.
this is not a finished product. (yes i realise that microsoft have a history of launching buggy/not polished products, and to then improve them).
until official launch has occurred all this talk of beta.msn relevancy is premature.
i would be willing to bet that day one of msn search will include a big change in serps and indexed pages than that shown in last day of beat.
One example. An authority site - the best in its field. Ranks number one in Google and MSN Beta for two word search. As it should.
Change one of those keywords to a slight variation - that a lot of searchers would use - and site drops to number three in MSN, but isn't even ranked in top 1,000 by Google.
Looking at MSN Beta against Google for a range of search terms we monitor - commercial and non-commercial - MSN provides better results (although not always perfect) time after time. Google relevance can be astonishly poor.
One example. An authority site - the best in its field. Ranks number one in Google and MSN Beta for two word search. As it should.Change one of those keywords to a slight variation - that a lot of searchers would use - and site drops to number three in MSN, but isn't even ranked in top 1,000 by Google.
Can you say Adwords, Adsense, IPO?
Google doesn't want the searcher to find what they are looking for in the free listings! All they want is people clicking on AdSense adds and Adwords...PERIOD. It only adds to their bottom line while the free listings don't do anything for them. They don't care if the free listings are irrelevant! Furthermore they don't care about you or me or anybody for that matter. Do a search for something and I'll bet at least 3 or 4 of the top 10 sites have adsense running!
Tell everyone you know about the new msn search and tell them to tell everyone they know. Maybe in a years time Google and it's IPO will die like altavista did.
Bring the heat MSN!
MLHmptn
I'm getting Yahoo results on the beta .nl and the beta .com for the first time here.
Today it's december 16 9.00
Sorry for my poor Englisch
Rick
Rick
Now our site it listed in all the same keyword searches that did not find the site for weeks
As others posted above, MSN beta seems to be giving "Yahoo like results". That is good from my standpoint, but I understand why it would lower the results for other sites that had enjoyed high results for the last several weeks.
As someone else suggested, this kind of wild variation is to be expected during a beta. Sorry if I have gotten carried away with my "political conspiracy theories".
Whoops...Now it's back to new beta results again..
B---E---T---A :>~
Sleep!
this is a beta test. this is not a finished product
Exactly. The totally different set of results that took place over the past few days is a clear demonstration of that - not yet what one would describe as fine-tuning.
Yep, the ridiculous beta results are back, complete with the cigar ad in the # 2 spot.
The good thing is that both Google and MSN BETA show a selection of relevant non-spam sites, but with MSN including new, valid websites. (Yahoo is a spammy datafeed joke in these SERPs.)
In summary, both are good but, from a searcher's perspective, it is great there is a difference between the results. Give people a choice (assuming the SERPs don't change too much before going live.)
One interesting note: The sites in MSN SERPs tend to be visually attractive and are better laid out for users than the ones showing in Google.
Is that because they are newer or just random chance? Or maybe these sites work very hard to convert every visitor they get, so the quality of actual onsite nav/layout/usability is higher.
CF
As an experiment I tried an 8 keyword search:
2 words - (Actress Name)
3 words - (TV Show Name)
2 words - Slide Show
There are a several sites on the web specifically about the actress and dozens of sites on the web about the TV show.
Most search engines will generally rank highest any sites that contain all 8 words, then sites containing 6, then 5, etc. with weight given to matching adjacent keywords without requiring quotes.
Not MSN Beta!
Result #1 was a link to a site that has pop up ads and whose only content is links to other sites. Our site happened to be one of the linked sites, so at least MSN Beta found one result about the actress, TV show, and slide show, albeit an indirect result.
ALL of the other results on the page contained only a couple of word matches:
No other resuts were about the actress
No other resuts were about the TV show
No other resuts were about a slide show of any kind
Here for example is the quoted text of the "Match" (sic) in result #2:
"to an annual growth rate of 3 percent, as consumers, worried about ... percent decline in spending on big-ticket items such as automobiles. ... people think that The Daily Show is a good source of real news, ask ..."
The only "matching keywords" were "3" and "Show".
Great resources for web searchers interested in entertainers are the movie database sites and the celebrity photographer photo sites. Most search engines will rank links to these sites highly. I still have not found MSN beta results that list these popular sites.
As I have said before, I think Google is bad enough, but MSN Beta is the worst search engine I have ever used.
