Forum Moderators: mack
Search for <snip> - 9 of the top 10 is <snip>.com....almost all serps seem to look pretty much this way...url only titles and just poorer than ever.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 7:34 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2006]
[edit reason] I bet even <snip> itself has bad results ;) [/edit]
What I see can only be phrased as general clutter. Someone pushed a button down there to be sure.
While I do see some relevant sites when I search within my genres, I also see spot 1 occupied by a site that has nothing at all to do with the keyword at hand.
Many url only site listings occupying top spots.
My best is that they fix this mess fairly quickly.
MSN results have been horrible for a long time
Yes, but now they've taken horrible and made it an art form.
It's so bad it's good just for the amusement factor.
One thing I will say that I think is good about MSN though is they tend to give new web sites with fresh content a shot opposed to Google which is always the old boys club mentality that old web sites must be the best and most trusted results. Sadly, the traffic from MSN is negligible so in the end it's all meaningless although if it wasn't for MSN my wife's website wouldn't get that trickle of Ad$en$e money she gets which makes her happy.
Wasn't this the mo last time too?
But it won't be me. They blow. And I'm a MSN-apologist.
For MSN's sake, I hope this most recent update isn't a sign of their how close they are to competing with G.
I don't think that will be enough to get people to use it now that the results are so bad.
Seriously, it's pretty bad.
Some of the more apparent issues:
- One site can occupy seemingly every one of the top 10 spots, if it has sub-domains.
- Is it just me, or are they actually giving weight to kw's-in-domain? :?
- All over the place they're showing footer type pages (aboutus/contact/privacy) instead of real pages...even to the point where both the main and indented listing are footer pages. Doh!
I could keep going, but tears are dripping off my face and into the keyboard, and I just don't want the same thing to happen to my computer as what just happened over there.
Is it just me, or are they actually giving weight to kw's-in-domain?
It's not just you, i mentioned that about 20 posts ago.
It's crazy but if it stays like this I'm getting some keyword domains QUICK!
Look on the bright side, they bring the least amount of traffic so it's kind of a why worry IMO. It's like slowing down to look at the car crash on the side of the road type of thing, nothing you can do to help and it doesn't impact your life significantly.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 8:16 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2006]
Hmmz - hard, we have given feedback to MSN before and they dont take action.
Exactly. I can't tell you how many "feedback" reports I have made. Furthermore, MSNDude was in here a long time ago asking for feedback. NOTHING has changed. Just one big subdomain search engine. If you want to find a subdomain, use MSN search.
I see for one of my domains they have the site without the www, even though it has been impossible to access the non-www since before MSN launched its first alpha abomination a couple years ago.
Attempting to find a bright side, this is just about the first time they have had a massive change like this. Given the fact their results were humiliatingly bad before this, drastic change was called for so it is a positive thing to see it happen, rather than just see their useless dreck day after day.
The problem of course remains that MSN has the most incompetent, poorly conceived search engine ever invented.
The new layout makes it hard to find search box. Maybe that's a subconscious attempt to protect visitors from search results.
I’m not even talking about crappy results in a competitive niche where the #1 site has only 35 IBLs and no relevant content.
I’m disappointed because I truly bought into this notion of a “learning genetic algo” that MSN search team feed us with for the past year. Now I can see it is all BS. No genetic algo can turn around 180 degrees overnight! Or it means that what it has learnt so far was no good and they had to pull the plug and start over. Which now puts into question the validity of the whole concept.
I was using MSN search for the past 6 month and up until yesterday I actually thought that MSN was OK – not perfect but OK. I was hoping that they would eventually figure out that not every blog on blogspot deserves high rankings. Instead they did precisely the opposite. Maybe from now on I need to host my sites on blogspot.
My first thought was to jump in and do an in depth analysis, however I think that would be time wasted. Something just isn't right.
My first thought was to jump in and do an in depth analysis
No need to jump headfirst into a cesspool to figure out what it is as you can see it's crap from a glance.
Now that is a dam good laugh - if they had a data base of some size perhaps they could produce an learning genetic algo that would work. Its learning off such a small sample of the nets data that it cant possibly work!
I suggest before they continue with this joke they scrap it, go back to the drawing board and start work first of all on a quality search bot that will at least start deep indexing sites and gathering data.
Then in six months time they could work on improving the order of what it displays.
I did state in my post last week here that they should return to the beta tag and i stand by that - msn = a waste of time and effort currntly if you ask me.
That pretty well sums it up! I guess they're following Google's lead. Once you trash the results it pretty well guarantees an increase in PPC revenues.
[blogs.msdn.com...]
Perhaps it will help them to notice what they did.
For now, flipping the switch back and testing something on a limited basis might make a lotta sense. There are too many problems that are very evident for them to keep it this way for long, so I'm with pmac; just watching and waiting for now. Currently, the only thing that we're doing is taking snapshots. Those often come in handy later. ;-)
The "learning genetic algo" is producing cr@p and is learning how to make that Cr@p even worse by learning from what its already f@cked up and doing a great job at continuing to do more!.
This update is its best ever as far as the learning genetic algo in concerned - just wait for the next update, by then it wont recognise anything at all, it will just shuffle up any site pages left in its index that it hasnt already deleted and serve them up anywhere!- or is it doing that already?
On a positive note at least we can all have a bl@@dy good laugh
Something nice about MSN...My site is fairly new so I get most of my search traffic from MSN. People find me using broad search phrases and select keywords, so I won't complain.
I'll see how my logs look tomorrow with this new "update."
This can't stick - domain spam is ruling right now.
Some site: searches just crack me up. For a 100 page site with the word on every page it will first say "of 853 pages" then you click to the second page and it shows 57 results total. This is incompetent on so many bizarrely contradictory levels that it just makes me think MSN is a search engine for someone on an acid trip.
===
I'll add that I do see a TON more of blog subdomains, so I guess that may be what most others are refering to.
[edited by: steveb at 3:19 am (utc) on Feb. 17, 2006]
