MSN Search Released Options

[SEbasic]

It looks like there are some exciting times ahead!

MSN Have announced that they are rolling out their new searchengine this thursday...

I can't wait

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[Adrian]

Interesting, I was just noticing in the logs that MSNBot has been active through our site again the last few weeks. Be interesting to see how it turns out, especially as we've got problems with Yahoo! crawling us properly. MSN certainly seems to be doing a better job of that, so will be nice to see if that produces some good rankings there too

[bwelford]

It must be true, it's in the news.
Microsoft seeks top search spot

The company claims the tool indexes more web pages than any rival and it has rolled in lots of the features seen on other search sites.

[SEbasic]

Well, I have to say, I'm a little confused...

Does anyone else know what's happening with this?

This is now out today - but it doesn't work...

http://beta.search.msn.com/

I was undr the impression that they were rolling this out to the general public now, but if it doesn't work, then how on earth do they expect people to start using it, let alone replacting Google with it.

[Jean_Manco]

The rush to try it out has probably wacked the servers.

According to Auntie, the new version will roll out to the main site at the end of the year: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4000015.stm

[Adrian]

According to MSNBC they aren't rolling out to the general public yet.

Though it does say the new engine should be accessible from a 'test' site. It doesn't say what that test site is, but you'd assume it was beta.search.msn.com, which is responding quite slowly, and not giving any results at the moment.

The Microsoft search engine, offered in 11 languages, will initially be available on a special “test” site. Gradually, some users visiting Microsoft’s MSN site may find that the existing search bar uses the new search engine, said Adam Sohn, a director with the company’s online division.

But a full rollout, perhaps with new features, isn’t expected until early next year.

[Adrian]

LOL, Jean, ya beat me to it a bit

[limey]

Seems to be up and working at beta.search.msn.com

It appears to be very similar to google IMO including things that you don't see at search.msn.com like the ability to view a cached version of a webpage, and the date of the last crawl of that page. In fact, the more I use it - the more it seems like google.

I run a team gaming website for mature Americas Army gamers in Britain so I ran the search 'British Clan' through both search.msn.com and beta.search.msn.com

My website appears as the 10th result of 119,357 matches on search.msn.com and it appears 4th of 758,212 matches on beta.search.msn.com

Hopefully it'll stay that way lol!

[bwelford]

That's an interesting test, limey.

Doing a search for 'marketing montreal', I get the following results for my website:
Google #1 of 2,470,000 web pages
Yahoo! #1 of 1,190,000 web pages
search.msn #5 of 237,315 web pages
beta.search.msn #4 of 2,380,155 web pages

Since MSN has been spidering about as frequently as Google during recent weeks, perhaps it's not surprising that they have similar numbers of web pages in their databases.

[Black_Knight]

The biggest change is that MSN have decreased their default number of results per page. MSN alone stayed with 15 results (plus sponsored) per page, rather than the more common default of ten. Now that looks set to change. I think that's a bit of a shame.

[Allergic]

Doing a search for 'marketing montreal', I get the following results for my website:
Google #1 of 2,470,000 web pages
Yahoo! #1 of 1,190,000 web pages
search.msn #5 of 237,315 web pages
beta.search.msn #4 of 2,380,155 web pages

Should check all the pages Barry:

401-498 of 689,930 containing marketing montreal

That's less than 500 pages actually.
You can't verify any word if MSN have more than 500 results.
Each time it's less than 500 results, if you add "&count=100" to the URL you will normally see the numbers of results slice by half !!!

It is a very bad engine. For generic or popular query it is bad to medium but if you search very specific terms it is very bad.

The only good point to MSN Beta is the integration of Encarta in it.
Here some weirds point I post on it.

[pressd]

Not sure about our search engine placement (something we need to work on!). But our press releases have started to appear in MSN Newsbot. http://uk.newsbot.msn.com/search/?nq=OPPOS...O+BLUNKETT%27S+

Which is pleasing !