MSN Live Updates - Searchification

[pageoneresults]

Oilman has a pretty good write-up on the MSN Searchification event taking place in Mountain View, California. Read on and then come back and share your comments. Apparently there are some very big changes afoot and MSN may come out a "player" after everything is said and done with?

MSN Searchification
[oilman.ca...]

MSN is making 6 major investments to the Fall Update

1. Coverage - index size
   
2. Query Intent
   
3. Query Refinement
   
4. RankNet
   
5. Structured Information Extraction
   
6. Rich Answers

P.S. The information from this event was embargoed until 2100. Apparently they pushed that up to 1700.

To see the new live in action...

[search.live.com...]

Now, use a commercial term for your search query. ;)

[BillyS]

If MS thinks their results have been better than Y! since 2006 someone should be ordered to take a drug and alcohol test.

[rogerd]

I hope "index size" leads to better deep spidering and indexing. To me, that's a huge drawback for MSN right now. If I'm looking for tech help or other content likely to be buried in a support community, I'll go straight to Google. From the standpoint of the deep content sites I manage, I can see the difference, too - far more Google traffic than MSN, even taking their disparate market shares into account.

[Brett_Tabke]

very nice write up there Oil. Thanks.

[eljefe3]

Boy I looked at a few SERP's and they are terrible, unless you are a guestbook/blog spammer. Maybe I'm in competitve spaces, but all I see are .edu spammed URL's.

[FrankWeb]

Just did a search for a paranormal keyword. The first 4 results were all different pages from one url. That's not an improvement to my opionion.

[adfree]

Horrible at best! Not one of my sites shows more than 20% satisfying results as compared to G (title, description, completeness, actuality).

Live retains the leadership position for bad SERPs in my league with Y! coming in as a very close second.

I won't complain about G for years to come.

[night707]

At least LIVE is now sending a bit of traffic to us whilst yahoo traffic is down at lowest levels.

Google is more dominant than ever. Sorry Bill!

[Vimes]

Hi,
well all my search terms have risen but I'm not sure if thats such a good thing when i use the site operator they have increase the size of my website 200%, their a long way of getting the actual size of my site correct, more pages than before but I'll be baffled to where they have got them from.

I've found some issues with 301 redirects appearing as a URL title
so maybe thats where the issue is with my page totals, I've had the redirect on site for years now to stop any duplicate issues in G, hopefully that will sort itself out our the next few days.

Vimes.

[akela007]

Nnahhhhh... It's still not providing any good results. Search cats and see the difference......

[RichTC]

Is there much point discussing it?

Its the same old junk results as ever and the same old spin we keep hearing from them about how great the facility is.

In the grand scale of things in terms of search quality the order is as follows (top 10 with MSN at the back of the pack):-

Google
Yahoo
Ask
AOL
Tiscali
Lycos
Dogpile
MSN
Altavista
WiseNut

I see absolutely zero improvements to the search and they have absolutely zero chance of pulling market share from either Google or Yahoo whilst they continue to churn out this junk yet maintain its a great search facility.

Once they wake up to the fact that the search facility is dire and want to seriously look at improving it we may then have a chance at having a serious contender to googles hold on the market. Currently i think they beleive their own marketing BS.

What a waste!

[Errioxa]

Can you search using in Advanced --> Links to

Does it works?

I don't see anything... never

[mikedee]

[search.live.com...]

As the register says [theregister.co.uk]

Feel free to chuckle.

Also from this blog [oilman.ca]

Rich Answers:
new answers platform
answers and multi media are incorporated in main serp
main improvements to news, images answers, local and maps

Example - san jose weather - results in page. Don’t need to click away.
Example - stocks - real time data.
Example - Barack Obama - integrated news
Example - space shuttle video - video in results

BUT

[search.live.com...]

Wheres the realtime data?

And wheres my celeb ranking data?

[search.live.com...]

The super new live search must not be live yet....

EDIT: The search is still behind the scenes so you have to go to this url first to set a cookie.

[search.live.com...]

The stock results look like googles, except a bit smaller.

[surftrack]

wow...

i actually kind of like it.

and i am not a microsoft fan.

for non product searches it now shows more organics because the header has a smaller footprint.

sucks for product serp sites though that aren't playing in the big leagues.

[JS_Harris]

Thanks Oilman

I like it too. I gave two sites a once over and love the results. I'll be using MSN search a bit more than I have been.

[crobb305]

At least the blogspot spam seems to be gone. That has been my biggest complaint for the past 2 years.

When will this be launched?

[surftrack]

looks like the public beta (whatever that means) will be oct. 15

[graeme_p]

RichTC, I agree with your ordering apart from Altavista.

Altavista uses Yahoo Search, and their web search results are identical. Other searches are different. News seems to be better, images worse.

I prefer the Altavista UI. It also has some nice touches like inferring your country from your Accept-Language header, rather than your IP.

[Fish_Texas]

Be prepared for another Aug 2006 upset on Oct 15th.

Many of my pages (ALL white hat, NO problems) that are indexed and showing on Live right now, are not indexed in the New Live (using the link posted in this thread)
All that's showing in the serps is my index page, and a few other pages. Other perfectly good pages are not even indexed.
Oh h*ll, here we go again...chasing our tails.
Same old BS serps RichTC...

Fish Texas

[edited by: Fish_Texas at 6:46 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2007]

[WiseWebDude]

I have been searching on the new MSN Live and it seems to be getting a LOT better to me! I am impressed. WAY better than their old search to be sure. They are on to something here now. I am excited to see how it all works out. I think we should give credit where credit is due as this does look better to me.

[Fish_Texas]

Guess you're right WiseWebDude,
Need to see how it pans out...Hopefully my missing pages will appear soon...The new page does look better.
Fish Texas

[Vimes]

Found some of my page bloat totals, the new indices seems to be including urls that are blocked in my robots.txt I've thousands of url only listings for 301 redirects and pages that are blocked by my bot file.

anyone else seeing this or am i in for a hard fall on the live SERP's

Vimes.

[CainIV]

The best search results MSN ever had were one month - one year after they released their engine beta.

Since then, it's been like Mom trying to resurrect Grandma's secret recipe for cookies.

[King_Fisher]

One thing I have never been able to puzzle out. Bill Gates has all the money in the world.I know he is a very competitive dude.Why doesn't he take a big wad
of that cash and throw it at MSN?

Hire the best talent in the world, pay them top dollar plus. Steal them from Google, Yahoo and others. Hire the top marketing men, PR guys, etc, etc.

If they and Yahoo don't act soon Google will be so far ahead they will never catch up!...KF

[ulstrup]

I'm not impressed, seems like keyword in URL rules... and, yes, Live Search does have a problem in sorting out spammy .edu links.

[Achernar]

Found some of my page bloat totals, the new indices seems to be including urls that are blocked in my robots.txt I've thousands of url only listings for 301 redirects and pages that are blocked by my bot file.

Same here.
The new live index reports 112064 for my site. Which is possible, but only if it includes all excluded pages (duplicates and honeypots).

The worst thing is that it seems to ignore both robots.txt (when I exclude a page, I'm expecting that it's not included in the index, at all) and robots meta-tags : I'm using wildcard in robots.txt, and since msnbot doesn't understand this, I duplicate the setting in meta-tags ("noindex"). But I find plenty of these pages in the new index, with snippet and correct title (so it has read the page, but ignores the metatag).

[night707]

MSN Live Search results are pretty junky and miles behind Google when it comes to quality.

Live results for "Fashion Videos" is a good example for a rubbish search engine!

[pageoneresults]

The worst thing is that it seems to ignore both robots.txt (when I exclude a page, I'm expecting that it's not included in the index, at all)

Not going to happen if you are using the robots.txt method to exclude pages. With Google, you get a URI only listing but it is there and counted in the overall numbers. You're performing advanced searches which uncover this type of stuff so don't expect the general public to be digging back there and seeing your blocked content. Anyone else can just browse to /robots.txt and see what is going on (in most instances).

[Achernar]

Not going to happen if you are using the robots.txt method to exclude pages.

Why that? (beyond the rule that says "not spidering is not the same as not indexing")

What's the point to include url-only references? How would it help users who are fed this type of result? And how does the SE know that they are relevant to the search query?
MSN is indexing thousands of my honeypots pages. That's plain stupid. Google does not.

And if these results only appear with "inurl" or "site" commands, why include them at all in the index?

[drall]

Results in my vert actually beat Googles results! I cannot believe I am saying this but MSN is really starting to look serious. I showed over 2500 seperate 1-4 word phrase results to my co-owner and compared them to Googles and each time MSN returned cleaner and more accurate/updated results then Google for page 1.

They may still have some work to do but I really have to say way to go Microsoft, in our sector as long as you can get more traffic to your engine in general we may finally have some Google competition.