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. ;)

[graeme_p]

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.

Because one of the things that makes software development so difficult is that adding resources tends to lead to inefficiency rather than faster or better development.

Read "The Mythical Man-Month" for a really good discussion of this. It is a book that anyone in an IT related field should read.

[robzilla]

I only started seeing new results today, and must say they seem to have improved drastically, at least in my field. Enjoying the new layout as well.

[Vimes]

Yep looks like the new interface has gone live I'm seeing the new design and SERP's.

Vimes.

[surftrack]

i am as well...didn't think they were going live for another month....this is good though....i like it.

[MLHmptn]

I like the interface and the results in my sector are equal to what Google is showing though I don't like seeing my competition around me on 2 of 3 engines. :>~ Putting my sites aside I'm impressed. Good job MSN!

I also notice a huge improvement in the speed of the query! It's like Google fast now... Glad to see MSN is understanding that keeping it simple is sometimes the best thing to do rather than following Yahoo with the onslaught of images, news crap, etc., on the UI.

[edited by: MLHmptn at 5:02 am (utc) on Oct. 2, 2007]

[simonmc]

It is good for search that others are at least trying to compete with Google.

No matter what you think about Google, a monopoly has never been good news for the consumer.

If we can get into a three way split between Google, MSN and Yahoo I think the consumer will have great choice and in a healthy search market.

[tigger]

good improvement & better results on the serps I'm checking although a few of my newer sites seemed to have vanished of the face!

anyone seeing new sites dropping?

[wrkalot]

Has any one noticed this at the bottom of the results?

"Results are included for other related terms. Show just the results for < link >keyword/phrase< / link>."

it uses "noalter: keyword/phase"

Is this new?

[stump4]

MSN SEARCH.

Major Spammer - with sometimes all the top 10 SERPS belonging to my sites (out of thousands of returns). - Now they are all gone - My party is over, boo-hoo.

Good thing I saved plenty of captures to prove my heyday.

[followgreg]

Interestingly I've found that MSN has lost the Homepages of 2 of our sites.
Therefore no rankings, being replaced mostly by random small players.

I noticed Homepages disapearing in the past but it was usually on brand new sites, not old one as it seems to happen.

Somebody else noticed that?

[CainIV]

So far so good from what I see. Massive improvement from what I seen only three weeks ago.
The new design is much more user friendly. I do notice issues however site site: listings and some dropped home pages, time will tell how this works itself out.

[robzilla]

I see they're now also showing "site links," similar (well, pretty much identical) to Google's.

[flanok]

Well I am one of the unlucky ones.
Number one for some time now and now down to number 50.

What I have noticed though, is that no homepage within my sector, going back 40 results, has been cached during the month of October. My site since 22/9.

We know the sites are beng spydered, but it is as if they need to complete the operation before they re introduce the new cached pages back into the results.

I wait in hope.

Mark

[Fish_Texas]

Me too...about 20% of my pages are indexed into the new Algo.
100% were in the old Algo. From number 1 on most serps to zip, zero.
Hope they get it right soon.
Fish Texas

[BlueLeaf]

This new update wiped out all of my new websites, as well my clients newer sites. By wiped out, I mean they aren't even indexed anymore [after being fully indexed for about 4 months].

I lost a huge chunk of traffic, I wonder what happened?

[Fish_Texas]

Let's hope they realize they have a problem with indexing, if not, we're probably toast.
Fish Texas

[dusky]

If you rank well for your most important keywords, the new Live Search rocks, if it's the opposite, Live is the worst search engine yada, yada, doodle do. Are we going to have an independent opinion, no, as most here are webmasters looking after their sites interest. You may say, well, google is accurate enough and people generally happy with it, I say, it's the same old argument above except google now is the leading brand and we are usually suckers for trends. It's probably acceptable now to say "I googled a keyword on yahoo", come on Burger King's Big Macs are as tasty as McDonald's or even tatier.

[dusky]

I mean tastier, I must have been thinking of them instead of looking what I am writing.

[aly48]

"If you rank well for your most important keywords, the new Live Search rocks"

Trouble is if they don't index you, you can't rank at all!

Was indexed and reasonably ranked with several sites on old live and mssearch for years without a problem. Now only one site indexed with 3 pages instead of 60+

[BlueLeaf]

October 15, 2007... my new websites, as well as my clients, are still missing from the MSN Live index. The sites are about 4 months old, they weren't spam or low quality. I'm eager to find out what happened here, as they were ranking well.

[Fish_Texas]

My 2 sites are 5 years old and are good quality... only 20% of the pages are indexed in the new Algo, with no updates since September.
Only the home index page is showing in serps.

MSNSubmit has not been working since last week...why?
Cached pages change by the hour...what's up with this?

GEZZZZZZ, it's August 2006 all over again.

INDEXING (or lack of it) IS A MAJOR PROBLEM!
And YES, in MY market serps are still c*ap!

I'd like to know what's going on too! Any ideas anyone?
Fish Texas

[edited by: Fish_Texas at 6:48 pm (utc) on Oct. 15, 2007]

[Fish_Texas]

UPDATE: Perhaps a little hope for those who lost their sites with new Algo.

A few of my pages are being recrawled and reindexed and are back in the serps.

Fish Texas

[BlueLeaf]

Weird, it seems like any 4 month old or newer site without link partners, got completely deleted from the index.

[aly48]

Main site I lost all together was re-indexed yesterday.
All pages showing but positions nowhere at present.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

My first post ever - in this forum. I never thought I would have a reason to post here... but...

Microsoft Bot has been hitting one of my sites very hard lately.

Now, the referral traffic is equal to and sometimes greater than Google.

A really nice unexpected bonus in traffic.