MSN Search Has Arrived

strikehosting writes "The new MSN Search, "the first-ever search engine built from the ground up by Microsoft", has been launched worldwide. It will be available in 25 markets and 10 languages. A few features though, like MSN Music and 'Search Near Me', are available only in the United States. Sporting a cleaner look and a simplified layout, MSN Search has a more prominent position on the home page. The features that are available here include tabs that allow consumers to target searches to the Web, news, images, music, desktop or Microsoft Encarta."

[tt]:Encarta

[daniil]

From the Seattle Times article [nwsource.com] on this:

Microsoft still hopes that people will buy the Encarta software for additional tools not included in the search engine, such as a guide that helps children finish their homework. The Encarta features will make a huge difference in setting MSN Search apart from rivals, said Charlene Li, an analyst tracking the search industry for Forrester. "Here is this objective, fact-based information that you need," she said. "It's really hard to find that objective point of view" online.

For one, the use of the online Encarta isn't completely free. If you make an Encarta search, you'll notice a clock ticking in the left side of the screen: you only have two hours of "free" Encarta (remember, kids, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, especially coming from Microsoft). It seems that it won't stay free for long.

So, here's the dilemma: should one use non-free but objective Encarta or free but biased Wikipedia?

msnbot.msn.com going crazy!

[Zerbey]

msnbot.msn.com hit my web site no less than 10,661 times last month so I'll be interested to see what difference this has on my vistor numbers.

When Google launched I saw my hits go up quite considerably in the space of 6 months.

Misleading link

[IamTheRealMike]

That's a very misleading story article (surprise surprise), the actual page is search.msn.com [msn.com] - not the MSN.COM portal linked to above. It's a lot cleaner and smaller.

Come on guys. I know we're all rooting for Google in this fight, but childish tricks like that are just not cricket.

Re:Why?

[Vacindak]

One BIG difference I've noticed is that MSN search doesn't ignore sites with query strings in the URL. My entire site uses them, so it's pretty obvious in the logs, the MSN bot is the only thing spidering past the front page. If I want Google to index my site, I'd have to set up URL rewriting, which my shared web host doesn't allow. If you want to find information on my website, MSN search is the only way to get it right now if it's not on the front page.

Of course, the order that the results are returned in is total crap, and that's what most people notice.

Re:[tt]:Encarta

[BigDogCH]

Thats funny, but oh so true! Take a random line from any paper turned in by a highschool student, plop it into google, and it will come up 50%+ of the time. I showed my students this, and still hit the 50% mark. They won't even change a few words so it doesn't send off flags. They would rather take a 0.

Here's a concept...

[hanshotfirst]

Brittanica, down at the library! It's free, relatively unbiased, and Yes, people still go to the library.

On second thought, it'll never catch on. Too much research involved in research.

Re:[tt]:Encarta

[gorre]

For one, the use of the online Encarta isn't completely free. If you make an Encarta search, you'll notice a clock ticking in the left side of the screen: you only have two hours of "free" Encarta

It is not free in any sense of the word, the second article I looked at gave me: "The article is exclusively available for MSN Encarta Premium Subscribers." --- "MSN Encarta Premium: Get this article, plus 35,000 other articles, an interactive atlas, dictionaries, thesaurus, study centre, and more for £19.99/year." I think I'll stick to wikipedia.

Re:Thats good and all, but...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

You might try:

$ lynx -source http://search.msn.com/ | wc -c
3008

Doesn't seem too bad to me.

Of course, it doesn't prove your point using misleading data.

Re:Better results than Google?

[Green Poison]

Google has a really good feature for me, as a researcher, that I don't see in MSN: searching into pdf files. In a simple search for a title of a paper of my research group, the results in Google where more accurate, with the paper (in pdf format) as a result, and results in citeseer too. A search for words in the abstract resulted in papers related to my work too. I think that in searches more specific than "Linux" or "Microsoft", Google still wins.

"free but biased Wikipedia?"

[FooAtWFU]

or free but biased Wikipedia?

Please note that Wikipedia's number one rule is called NPOV [wikipedia.org] for "neutral point of view", before you go accusing it of widespread bias left and right. Not that it always lives up to the goal of being entirely bias-free, but I'd hardly call Encarta unbiased either, and it makes no claim that objectivity is an object.

And it's not like the two are mutually exclusive, either. If you have Encarta, you can still look up stuff on Wikipedia, compare and contrast their approaches, and learn more from the profit.

But Encarta probably is more suitable for children, because Wikipedia makes little effort to self-censor offensive material that you may not want your child to know about.

Re:first impression

[Skim123]

The legal disclaimer makes perfect sense to me. Think about it, they get revenue by people using their site, seeing their ads, and clicking on them. Without that legalese, they'd be opening the door for someone creating a search engine branded on their own site that uses MSN as the backend.

Google does the exact same thing, mind you. They have the Google API [google.com] that lets you programmatically issue search requests but you need a license (granted, it's free) and are limited to 1,000 queries per day. That query limit is Google's way of ensuring it's only used by hobbyists/small-time folks, which, IMHO, is essentially the same thing MS's disclaimer is trying to enforce.

Re:[tt]:Encarta

[nyri]

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH& srch_type=0&q=google [msn.com]

Parent's joke aside, I checked the page out of the curiosity.
I was positively surprised: the localization of MNS Search was a light-year ahead of Google (I'm from Finland). The first search result pointed to www.google.fi not www.google.com. Also, the page contained links to Finnish news about Google. This is nice as I like to read news from my local perspective and about local issues (America-centrisism of the Internet and the Google news service annoys).

I think the competition does well to the search industry. Therefore I'm gave MNS Search a change and, in fact, am going to use it until Google gets its localization shit together. I also urge others to give MNS Search real change. Google may be good, but monopoly won't make it better.

Re:Browser Locales

[NoOneInParticular]

I doubt that that's the issue here. I'm running konqueror and firefox under linux here, and for neither of these the Dutch locales are installed. I usually get very confused when I read Dutch on a computer (though it's my native tongue), so I don't ever install anything Dutch specific on any computer, so I guess it's really the address that's the issue. (as far as I know, the only regionalized place on this computer is the time zone). Also 'links' brings me straight to the Dutch site.

In any case, it's not really the point how it figures out I'm in Holland. I later noticed that for many searches, the top results returned are from .nl sites. It's an interesting strategy to be very region specific, but I really don't like that it pollutes my search as well. When I for instance type "Genetic Programming" (a subject I'm interested in), the first result I get is genetic-programming.org, the main page of John Koza from Stanford. The subsequent three hits are (English) pages on .nl domains, then genetic-programming.com, and again a lot of hits within the .nl domain (all in English as this is an international research area). This is totally unacceptable, and makes the thing completely unusable. I don't think pure regional search engines are the way to go, and the fact that I can't change it really infuriates me. I've tried a couple of research subjects more and they all bring me to .nl sites, not to authorative international sites. This is really bad.

Welcome to Microsoft's regionet: where do you want to stay put today?

Re:Thats good and all, but...

[MrWa]

Did you bother atleast loading the search page? Microsoft Search [msn.com] is not exactly slow or bloated.

Re:[tt]:Encarta

[MightyPalm]

Yes very nice, but my ip was originally assigned to norway, and MS believes i am norwegian (even though i'm from Denmark).
This means i get a lot of norwegian results i didn't ask for, and i can't disable it!!! I can change the language in the "settings" bar, but i can't change my localization!!

MS, why oh why couldn't you check my browser language? Why couldn't you give me a choice of my own?

Oh wait.. that's right.. not your style. Google, i'm a' commin' home!