every link counts on msn

what spam filter?

[Crush]

I find that msn's bot finds every link. Very good. What it does not do is evaluate them. I can see a ffa scheme that outsmarts msn and yahoo.

Google is actually smarter when it comes to junk links. I see why the sandbox exsists now. If you can rank on a good term on msn in days then it is easy to game. The engineers are going to have to work harder on some sort of link evaluation.

[Tigrou]

I think you are right. None of the SEs has found a "good balance" yet that is stable over the long term.

I think it is understood though that MSN will improve much quicker than G. (They have more wiggle room.)

[Crush]

I justed typed my name into msn and nothing came up on the first page. What crud

Google comes up with 5 first results all about me.

Who is more relevant? Even gigablast came up with a whole page of reults about me. Maybe msn should purchase them instead!

[inbound]

Hmm,

I'm not one for searching for my name but I did as a test to reply to this.

#1 Google
#1 Yahoo
#1 Gigablast
#4 Msn

I'd say that I should not be top of millions of pages as I can't believe that there aren't better pages that the ones that make it to the top. I had a look at the other 3 pages, I can't judge their worth but they certainly do have relevance.

Maybe MSN are doing a better job?

[Spica]

Searches for people's names are actually very useful in revealing the focus and flavor of different search engines. Searching for just my last name, the #1 and #7 results in Google are pages from the university and hospital where I work. These pages doesn't even show up in MSN. In fact, MSN seems to avoid all pages with this name in the page's title, and that's clearly a flaw in this case...

[Crush]

<Searches for people's names are actually very useful in revealing the focus and flavor of different search engines>

Depends on the name. My name is almost unique. There is one 1 other guy there on the net with the same name as me and he does not use the net as much. Therefore the sites my name is on typically have more relevance because the pages should have more power.

So I do see this as a MSN failing because other engines seem to get it right for relevance.

I tell you what I also see as a weakness. There are doorway pages we have made and they show up, there are some sites that just do not make the grade and have a few link pointing at them and on msn it makes them first page material?

[houseofsecrets]

When I search for my name on MSN, I get no results at all for myself. Just tons of stuff about guys more famous than me!

This is an outrage!

[Green_Widge]

The lack of proximity, in deciding the SERP's, is a major flaw. There is no way they will be able to carry on for long with this big of a whole in their algo.

Every searcher automatically thinks using proximity, so the SE's should too. The searches I did in MSN yielded mostly garbage, because the SERP's treated each word I entered equally, instead of treating them as a unit with a wieght that was different than the sum of their parts.

[houseofsecrets]

Every searcher automatically thinks using proximity, so the SE's should too.

How about "every searcher uses natural language to form queries, so the SE's should too"? that pretty much ruins the whole proximity argument, IMO.

Or perhaps "almost every searcher forms their queries improperly"? Would you then add the clause "so the SE's should too.