MSN Search Has Arrived 535
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."
Is this REALLY launched this time? (Score:5, Interesting)
my.msn.com [msn.com]
Differ from the results on:
search.msn.com [msn.com]
Seems like a really inconsistent launch.
Doesn't correct my spelling (Score:5, Interesting)
I need to look for a specific word, but I have no idea how to spell it properly.
How can I find what I'm looking for if I don't know how it's spelt?
I'll stick with Google, thanks all the same.
Lovely (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway for various phrases my site comes out in the number one position whereas on Google it's somewhere down in 10th place. To be fair though I am not sure my site is the best resource for these particular phrases.
It's certainly fast as well.
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Image search also gives much more hits than the MSN equivalent.
MSN does not have a spelling checker.
So for these, MSN search is not as good as google.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
type in your question (Score:2, Interesting)
I clicked on the picture of a smiling Mr Gates and he told me to "type in your question", so I was expecting an ask.com type search, but the results looked like any other search engine, and it did a very bad job of answering my question.
Also, the result page was in Dutch, because it noticed that I'm in Holland, but there was no obvious link to switch to English like Google has. Presumably Google knows I prefer English because of my browser settings.
Also, there appears to be an RSS feed, but it's not useful enough for Firefox to recognise it.
Robot rules breakage. (Score:2, Interesting)
What the world its come? arghh..
Fortunally enough my site its not compatible with IE
Language? (Score:3, Interesting)
This alone is reason enough not to use it in most cases.
But the look is clean enough, and it looks like no sponsored links on the "linux" keyword.
At least its not MS centric (yet) (Score:2, Interesting)
ShellExecute microsoft
and a number of variations, and on the MS search, I didn't get any MS sites in the top few entries.
the same search in google brings up the correct msdn documentation as #1
Still unsure of the quality of other searches, but competition is good
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:5, Interesting)
MSN: * Were you looking for fone
Google: Did you mean: phone
so, it does have corrective facilities, but google works better.
Now, the ultimate, searching for "par hiltn"
MSN: * Were you looking for par hilton
Google: Did you mean: paris hilton
Mind you, google does have a special affinity with the woman, so we will let them off.
Google had better wake up ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft always plays this tortoise/hare game with its software. Every few weeks, msn search will get incrementally, imperceptibly better. I remember back in the day, IE was crap and used Netscape. Slowly, I wound up using IE more-and-more until Firefox/Mozilla came along. If the guys at Google stay on their toes and don't become complacent they shouldn't have a problem, though.
Although I do not like Microsoft, for us the consumer, having the two giants smashing at each other for market share is nothing but good. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've felt Google has gotten lazy. Lots of the search results are nothing but sales sites these days ... with all that brain power they brag about, you'd think they could have done something about that by now.
first impression (Score:5, Interesting)
On MSN's side: they're offering search results in RSS format. This is good; but: (and you know there's always a "but" when Bill is involved), their RSS results have usage restrictions:
Copyright © 2005 Microsoft. All rights reserved. These XML results may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner or for any purpose other than rendering MSN Search results within an RSS aggregator for your personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of these results requires express written permission from Microsoft Corporation. By accessing this web page or using these results in any manner whatsoever, you agree to be bound by the foregoing restrictions.
MSN search looks interesting, for now. But I'm not giving up my Google anytime soon.
Having said that: it would be interesting to hear from some MSN people about the architecture: how many servers? What OS? What kind of interconnect? etc.
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
Searching for Firefox, Google wins 17mil to 1.2mil, but the news portion gives much more recent news than google. They both seem to focus on the same pages on the first page however.
Interface wise, you can definetly tell who their trying to emulate. It has a "It's Google with more blue color" Feeling to it. It's cached page content does not do autohighlighting like google, which is a big minus in my opinion. Adjustment wise, I think they got something with the Search Builder, especially with the Result rankings slider.
Overall, it seems like it use use some work search wise, but that could be just because it needs to do some more spidering. Even Google sucked Vs Altavista until it's spidering caught up. Only time will tell.
Re:search results vs google (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore, the first news hit I get for 'Linux' is an article in Computable, "Microsoft: veiligheid van Linux is een mythe". Translated, "Microsoft: safety of Linux is a myth". Second and third news item are ok (skype and cheap linux laptops). I do sense a bit of bias here, but it might be accidental. All in all, a less than happy user has left the MSN site, probably to never return.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't see what this would possibly give over Yahoo or other great search engines. What possible benefit could Google give to this that is not already there? Why bother reinventing the wheel, except for the purpose of advertising dominence?
Seriously, you dont look at whats there currently and say 'Oh well, everyones using them at the moment, I might as well not bother'. And Im not just talking about Google -vs- MS Search here.
Re:Is this REALLY launched this time? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:3, Interesting)
Encarta is written by professionals striving to produce unbiased facts. Wikipedia is written by a small core of the same, plus a number of people who more or less know what they're doing and have a vague idea what "unbiased" means, plus a larger number of people who don't know as much as they think they do, plus a small but active swarm of trolls who deliberately introduce misinformation and bias at every opportunity.
The logical conclusion is that Wikipedia will be (a) broader and more up to date, as a result of the greater number of contributors and their more varied backgrounds, and (b) less accurate and objective, as a result of the lesser expertise of many of the contributors and the active sabotage by a small minority. There are thus disadvantages as well as advantages to the wiki approach; only a fool, or a blind fanboy, would deny that.
The only point open to debate is whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. And Microsoft's position - that limited, out-of-date, but reliable information is more valuable than wide, up-to-date, but unreliable information - is a reasonable one to take, whether you personally agree with it or not.
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:msnbot.msn.com going crazy! (Score:3, Interesting)
msnbot ate up half my bandwidth allowance in three days when it first started crawling a while back. It's the rudest robot I've ever encountered; Google manage to give me good search results with barely any bandwidth usage, so why MSN has to be so greedy I can't imagine.
Anyway,went straight in my robots.txt. Problem solved.
Re:Thats good and all, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
$
37951
$
2907
$
2611
There's no need to misinterpret the data, the result is better for Google anyway.
Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Until now, Google was my preferred search engine, so that is what I am comparing against.
I clicked the link in the story, which brings up the main MSN page. It's yet another site that doesn't use the whole browser width (and that is getting really annoying). It's also full of crap I'm not interested in (more on that below) and I notice that it tried to pop something up.
There's an ad for their search, so I clicked that, but it redirects via atdmt.com, which is either a tracker site or an ad site. Either way, it was on my blocklist, so the browser went nowhere.
So far, not impressed.
Then it occurred to me that the search site is probably separate from the main MSN site, so I tried search.msn.com [msn.com]. Lo and behold, a lightweight page for entering my search query, in a similar manner to Google's. No ads on this page either! I liked that. OK, so the URL is a little longer than Google's, but these days I do my searching from that input field in the top-right corner of Konqueror/Firefox.
It also correctly detected which country I'm in - presumably from the IP address or hostname. (The MSN main page didn't, and gave me loads of US-centric stuff instead, which is what I meant by stuff I'm not interested in.) It also used localised text for the country I'm in (German). That's all well and good, but my browser settings actually specify en-gb first, so they get a point for being clever and detecting the country, but lose 10 points for completely ignoring my own preferences. I would expect the page in German if I went to msn.de, but the .com one shouldn't make such assumptions.
I tried searching for a few various things, and compared the results to Google. It seemed that some of the more obscure terms had better results in the MSN search. Certainly, each of the two would return a different set of results for the same query. I can't really say that one was definately better than the other - this is one of those things you have to try for yourself, and it will probably only become apparent after a non-trivial amount of usage.
One other thing that must be said to both MSN and Google: stop using bloody fixed width columns!
I have a screen width of 1280, and in this day and age, much larger sizes are becoming more common. I want the width used more effectively so I don't have to scroll down as much. The HTML isn't even difficult! Annoying things like this give people reason to choose one site over another.
-- Steve
I searched for "Firefox browser" ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:1, Interesting)
Google: Did you mean: bukkake
MSN: Returns all results with misspelling.
Exactly. That's why I thought there was no spellcheck in MSN search, I had tried "boilogy" and google suggested "biology", MSN search just gave me sites who misspelled biology.
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:2, Interesting)
Wonder how it does with "Balmer goes ape"?
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:what? (Score:3, Interesting)