New MSN Search is LIVE

We are seeing a rollout of MSN new search

[drdsl2000]

continued from: [webmasterworld.com...]

---

It looks like it might be tied into their lateset Windows update.

Results look very good so far, Look out Google!

AND THERE WAS THREE

The Dr

[silverhead]

I've been comparing both of the MSN engines and I find a wild difference in results (comparing both side by side with exact same search). Where my sites ranked well on the old engine currently they are now buried, only a few ranking well. To a lesser degree Google results have been somewhat different..WHY? Yahoo, and then some of the other less used engines are still kind to me! In this ever changing business it's just the matter of me getting with the program as the new engine will be as it is!

[Crush]

Where my sites ranked well on the old engine currently they are now buried, only a few ranking well.

Because msn beta is crud. They should keep the old version. It is much better. I find some sites ( on msn beta) that are in the serps that are nowhere to be seen now.

[mikec]

fyi, the old msn, is just yahoo

[Crush]

"fyi, the old msn, is just yahoo "

not entirely but based yes nearly the same

[xcomm]

I see the new MSN screen live when going to

[search.msn.com...]

!

This is very in the morning from Europe and I'm not using any new SP2 as I'm under GNU/Linux. :-)

BTW:
The crawler is too running hot...

BTW2: They are load balancing behind Akamai's GNU/Linux clusters:

ping search.msn.com
PING a134.g.akamai.net (194.109.192.7): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 194.109.192.7: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=38.8 ms

[acee]

I'm seeing a tiny number of referals from .com and .co.uk since middle of last week from sites that aren't in the Yahoo index.

The beta search results may be of variable quality (although I've found them to generally acceptable) but the market needs another player; Google's results are poor and Yahoo is a glorified front end to PFI/PPC.

An additional source of referals is always welcome, and more importantly, it spreads the risk of over exposure to a single search engine (is Yahoo still considered a search engine?).

I can sympathise with webmasters who are losing position in the new index. Many of us experienced a similar problem when Yahoo switched from Google.

The switch to the new index can't come soon enough for me, and if they also take a small percentage of Google's searches and a massive slice of Yahoo's, I'll be really chuffed.

[sachac]

I lost a lot of traffic when Yahoo switched to ink and carried forward an ink penalty on my company's website. This caused me to lose both Yahoo and MSN traffic. All emails to Yahoo to have the situation remedied, have remained unanswered.

Now, with the new MSN roll out my sites are doing even better than in Google, since there is no sandbox of sites. I hope MSN kicks Google butts and bury Yahoo in the process, both for their legendary arrogance.

[RoySpencer]

still seeing spurts of beta results from regular search in log files..been about the same frequency the last few days.

[DigiSEO]

For what it's worth, I'm seeing the BETA results from my computer.

[Tigrou]

acee -- good points.

It nicely encapsulates the issue:

The beta search results may be of variable quality (although I've found them to generally acceptable) but the market needs another player; Google's results are poor and Yahoo is a glorified front end to PFI/PPC.

I still wonder though, Google seems to play a game of "wait and trump" other SEs. They wait until Yahoo (etc.) act, then 2 days later they announce they are doing the same thing but better. Latest example is the Jump from 4 billion to 8 billion pages ... nicely timed after Yahoo's announcement.

Things like that might be done to win the PR war (woth it alone), or to maximise their PPC $$.

So when MSN does go live, I wonder what trick they will pull out? The end of the sandbox?

CF