MSN Update 6.25.06

I see completely new results in my sector. Not too bad...

[mboydnv]

New SERPS today in my niche

I have a new cached page of 6.24.06 of my index that is #7 for my KW. (i changed my title tag on 6.15.06)

AND... the same index cached 6.10.06 is also in there as #14 for the same KW. (using my pre 6.15.06 title)

That's kinda weird....

[crobb305]

I thought I did too, but then I deleted my cookies, tried again, and saw the old results.

Ofcourse, there could be some fluctuation. But, I don't anticipate that much is happening right now, as the engineers are are likely working on changes behind the magic curtains. This may take some time.

[msndude]

It's a pretty safe bet that we won't do an update on a Sunday afternoon -- especially not one as beautiful as today was. :-) Saturday is out too.

In fact, we're unlikely to do an update on a Friday, since it can mean sacrificing our weekends if there are problems.

We do occasionally do A/B tests of experimental new engines, so it's barely possible that you might have seen results for one of those, but it's more likely that there's an error in your process somewhere.

[GameMasterM]

Remarkable, it shows MSN is not hungry to compete with the search engines currently ahead of them. The bloated bureaucracy of MSFT is so evident here.
Would anyone working in a start-up with a chance to take a run at search supremacy be taking weekends off? Not a chance.
Did Bill Gates take weekends off when his original group was hammering out Windows? I doubt it.
I'm thinking MSFT doesn't have the heart it takes to win the search race. It's over unless they do buy Yahoo as has been rumored of late.

If I were a Microsoft's search engineer I would be available 24/7 and would be sleeping in the office tweeking the system and monitoring the indexing.
The shareholders deserve that if for no other reason.

[aly4848]

"If I were a Microsoft's search engineer I would be available 24/7 and would be sleeping in the office tweeking the system and monitoring the indexing."

They work with machines, they don't have to become one!

[msndude]

Well, you know we DO have a lot of open positions for software engineers . . .

[kneukm03]

It's a well-known fact that if you stay at the office 24/7, you get a crazed look and start chanting "developers, developers, developers..." to your fellow employees.

[GameMasterM]

MSN Dude, I'm sure you guys work hard and maybe I was a bit too frank. It just struck me that when a group has such a tremendous responsibility and challenging task working weekends is a necessity.

Not to mention you guys have a chance to make a mark and opportunities like this only come along once in awhile in life.
I'm not a search engineer but I don't have to be to get a crew excited about a project.
All I have to do is hire hungry personnel, inspire a start-up mentallity and offer incentives for innovation and met targets.
My crew would be stumbling over each other for the weekend shifts!
Cheers.

[msndude]

This is a long-term project, and people have to pace themselves. No one can work 80 hours a week for three years straight without burning out. It wouldn't be right to ask our team to do that, and it wouldn't be good for Microsoft either, since we'd lose our key folks. Keeping our talent and (just as important) keeping the expertise we're building matter a lot more than what we might gain from a few months of superhuman exertion.

[CainIV]

Well, you know we DO have a lot of open positions for software engineers . . .

LOL, well said...

[Marcia]

Excuse me for lack of business sense, but why should engineers work weekends and 80 hour weeks to do updates on Friday, Saturday or Sunday? Tuesdays are only a day before the Wednesday super market ads in the local papers, and they seem to do just fine with it. Is there anything wrong with Tuesday search engine updates?

[AngeloB]

Regarding updates,

Why is it that sometimes there is no update? Is that when you are tweaking things? Yesterday no update, and also no update today yet.

There used to be an update every day, including the weekends.

[msndude]

There are typically one or two every week, but no one notices them. As a policy, I only talk about the ones big enough for someone here to discover independently.

[AngeloB]

I meant the update with new indexed sites. You used to update every night with sites indexed the day before.

But now there are no sites that have been indexed after the 24th.

I think if you want to keep one of the positive things, like fresh sites and results offering "new" news, you should keep on updating and refreshing the results every night.. $0.02

[SmartMoney]

Did Bill Gates take weekends off when his original group was hammering out Windows? I doubt it.

I believe he actually bought it...for around 35k if I recall, he was way too smart to be working weekends...you don't get rich doing stuff like that.

[Komodo_Tale]

IMOHO

Microsoft is a more mature company. Enough people who have sacrificed way too many weekends have been there long enough to rise through the ranks and change the corporate culture.

(BTW: This transition is happening at Amazon.com right now.)

Also, here in Seattle, the long winter has ended, the rain gods have gone on summer vacation, and Appolo's chariot has been converted into a lowrider. Why sacrifice when you can worship?

[zeus]

Once again I see a homepage missing on a different site, but the worst thing is Im loosing a homepage, but they include my adsmanagement script links, which I even have on my robots.txt, where it says
User-agent: *
Disallow: /phpAdsNew-2.0/

[msndude]

AngeloB: Try it now.

[Praxus]

I definitely don't understand the filtering process when I can't even get this site indexed at all:

<snip>

and yet when I do a search on '<snip>' today, coming in second place is

<snip>

which is just pointed to a godaddy park page! (cached 2 days ago)

Now I know my site isn't that great; but it rankles that I can't even get indexed and a PARKED
page gets high rankings...

[edited by: engine at 2:17 pm (utc) on June 28, 2006]
[edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[asiaseo]

We still get little or no chance of our regional websites getting listed, but to be fair same applies to the other majors.
It is tiresome to search for something local and just get hundreds of sites that have no local content at all taking all the top places.
If the current search engines cannot figure it out them surfers will start to turn away and seek information elsewhere. Forums are surging.

[asiaseo]

I should say we cannot get decent positions, they are there and appear well on Brazil, Arabia, Singapore etc but on the normal.com, forget it!

[msndude]

I'm not going to comment on specific URLs in the main forum.

However, I'll make come comments on the general problem in the spam thread.

[AjiNIMC]

What is this update all about, is this a very major update as I hear a lot of people taking about it. Even some sites have lost their complete caches, I saw one such site and it is surely a great site deserving to be on top of the engine. I see it to work fine in other SEs like google and yahoo, right on top.

Is it some type of florida update happening with MSN? What is so special about this update? Just curious to know.

AjiNIMC

[longen]

If I were a Microsoft's search engineer I would be available 24/7 and would be sleeping in the office tweeking the system and monitoring the indexing.
The shareholders deserve that if for no other reason.

I don't follow - that might be good for shareholders - but what does it do for the employee?

[rstein68]

It just makes sense to roll out new features and tweaks when the majority of the big brains are going to be available.

[mboydnv]

This morning, the results in my sector are now back to what they were on June 24.

[AjiNIMC]

This morning, the results in my sector are now back to what they were on June 24.

ok, thats good. I was just doing some random checks and I saw MSN to be more spammy now. Keywords are highlighting brighter than ever.

Does msn contribute enough traffic for you?

[Martin40]

One of the themes of this update seems to be outbound links. On one of my keyphrases, the "nobodies" that have made it into the top10 are people that ask for link exchange and then don't link back or link back in a way the msnbot can't read. It's spam for sure :-).

[mboydnv]

Honestly, in my sector (travel)

MSN traffic has really converted. people who surf MSN for my main keyword buy!. I love this traffic, and was #1 for 2 years, then moved to #14 in last update and am now at #7, fighting to regain #1. Wish me luck. ;P

I changed my title tags, removed all H1 and alt tags also. Since update.

[Bennie]

I changed my title tags, removed all H1 and alt tags also.

Why on earth did you do that?