Is Live.com different from MSN Search

[asusplay]

Unfortunately my sites have been slipping on MSN in the last few weeks but I checked out the results on live.com and they are great (at least for my sites!).

Does anyone know whether these results are going to be the new MSN?

And why doesn't MSN use these results on live.com which seem to be quite relevant (and I'm not being biased...)?

[engine]

What options are you selecting when searching?

[cwalters]

This is a reply from MSNDude from another thread here that explains the difference between the two sets of results...

"I've explained this one elsewhere, I think, but the reason for the difference is that the live.com beta has the adult content filter set to "strict," while search.msn.com uses the moderate setting. Once the beta actually offers a control to let users change the setting, it will produce results identical to search.msn.com. That should be soon.
But it really is the same search engine behind both of them. "

[asusplay]

Thanks for the replies, but the search queries I am trying are for non adult searches, so I don't see how that should affect them. In any case I am searching from MSN UK, but for my liking the results on Live.com seem very promising and much more relevant then the current MSN offering.

[cwalters]

I'm in the same boat. But,I am sure that the MSNDude explanation applies to all results. He was respondng to a question from me a few weeks back that was similar to your question, and not related in any way to adult searches.

So, I am afraid that the live results are the old ones, and as such, are doomed.

[asusplay]

Well that's a shame, what's on Live.com seems so much better than what is being returned by the current MSN algo. Oh well.

[Fish_Texas]

If Live is giving old results, where does one go from here?
Do you think there was a glitch in the algo and the dust will settle?
I don't get it...I'm using white hat opt...no keyword stuffing, page relevancy is great, over 1000 link backs, proper meta tags...overall page density is 2% and 5% body density.

Can someone help with the above? Recommendations?

My question is, why are all my pages in the exact position on pg 3 regardless of the strength of the page? As a test, I took off all keywords from a page...it was crawled and bingo, it's still in the same place.
Scratching my head on this one.
Thanks in advance for any help.

[chrisv1963]

"Well that's a shame, what's on Live.com seems so much better than what is being returned by the current MSN algo"

I agree, the live.com results are great.

[Buckley]

Still not up to google but i agree, far far better..still a few odd ones but give me that algo any day over the rubbish being dished up on mSN currently.

Really hope they can sort themselves out but at this stage they are not a contender, IMO :)

[Swanson]

I think it is remarkable that in a few short years they are even getting anywhere near Google who should be light years ahead.

Of course, they aren't there yet - but they seem to update so regularly now that if they put crawl depth as a priority then they may start to return the more obscure results better.

I certainly don't think they are years off - as they should be really with the catch up.

[msndude]

Swanson: We appreciate the kind words. We're working hard to prove you right. :-)

Everyone else: we do listen -- especially to specifics. Try to remember that it can take a while to figure out the actual cause of a problem (or even to clearly describe the problem) much less actually implement and test a fix for it. That means a fix that doesn't break more than it fixes, of course.

Finally, although I'm still not going to preannounce anything, let me point out that Summer isn't over yet. :-)

[KenB]

Finally, although I'm still not going to preannounce anything, let me point out that Summer isn't over yet. :-)

You wouldn't be picking on Googleguy and Matt Cutts now would you?

On a serious note, is MSN Search/live.com going to offer a "sitemaps" like service so that MSN's bots can more effectively index sites? Also, Is MSN ever going to get better about deep crawling larger sites?

Personally, I'm really hoping that MSN search can give Google a run for its money and eventually does a better job of deep crawling big sites. Not just because I want my site crawled better, but also because as a user I often times am looking for obscure information on other sites that oftentimes requires really deep crawls.