Forum Moderators: mack
Results look very good so far, Look out Google!
AND THERE WAS THREE
The Dr
This beta results on FireFox thing is finally making me to use FireFox after years of I
It's not the browser triggering it... at least not for me. I have tried FireFox, FireBird, Opera, IE, and Netscape 7.x - I still get Yahoo results. Only by going directly to the beta search can I get the beta results...
I've tried some rather complex queries, not the simple one or two word phrases a webmaster might be looking at to see how they rank. I mean one of those longer queries that people type in...
I've tried several that good sense and show results on the old search, nothing on the new search at all. To many of these and people will run from this search engine:
Search tips:
* Try similar words. For example, some sites may use "film" instead of "movie".
* Make your search more general. For example, instead of using a specific product name, try typing the generic product category or manufacturer.
It's not the browser triggering it... at least not for me. I have tried FireFox, FireBird, Opera, IE, and Netscape 7.x - I still get Yahoo results. Only by going directly to the beta search can I get the beta results...
Here is Atlanta, GA, I am seeing Yahoo in IE and the new MSN in FF.
IP based seems right.
Steveb, for a while I thought you were being too harsh on the new msn beta, but I'm starting to think you're seeing it pretty clearly. I think I fell for some illusion that suggested that content was being given a higher rank, but now I think that was a mistake. We are after all talking about one of the least creative corporate computing cultures in existence here.
I agree, I can't believe MS is going live with this now, it's completely useless for any real searches. Maybe one out of 5 is good. But it is very consistent. IE 1, 2, and 3 were the worst major browsers out there. then they got it right, and 4 was the best available. They've done that with almost every area they've entered from scratch, it's their formula, put out anything for version 1, then wait for the MS backed inertia to start building market share, improve product each version, until it finally actually works. Crush opposition by making it cheaper or free. Cut into profit centers of competition, as dvduval very astutely pointed out the msn beta serps are already designed to do.
MS is nothing if not predictable. Here I was thinking that they would actually try to put out a good product for the first release, they've never done that, why start now?
However, that little bird has only about 36 hours to be right by my count, still no sign of beta results for me.
if they rush this product out and it sucks, they are such idiots. talk about a waste of promotions and publicity. people we'll see this crap and go right back to google.
that's how I was thinking about it too. But then I realized, no, that's not what's going to happen. What will happen is that the current userbase of msn, the ones too clueless to use a non msn product, the ones that stuck with the browser defaults their machine came with, will keep doing that. As long as the results are halfway useable they will suffer very little marketshare loss.
But they'll do live testing, and start building the next version, or tweaking this one. Maybe by next year MSN will be putting out results good enough to start attracting new users. Or maybe even by this summer if it's designed for flexible tweaking. They have patience, this doesn't need to take off now, it just needs to be barely good enough to let them start working on it with real user data.
Then, if Google keeps messing up, in 6 months msn can start advertizing, like, hey, new sites listed. no directory pages [ok, that's optimistic :-)] etc. I see the commercial like this: ms type fantasy girl is at computer, turns to boyfriend, says, hey, how come I cna't find the new website for that movie when I search for that new movie. Boyfriend turns to her and says, oh, well, you know, google doesn't have new websites. Didn't you know that? Try MSN, it has all the new stuff.
