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."
[tt]:Encarta (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:5, Funny)
Man, I sure wish I'd had Microsoft Shut Up And Study, Cut Your Hair, Get A Job 2005 when I was a kid!
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:2)
[tt] Re:Encarta (Score:2)
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 W
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:4, Funny)
You mean Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V ?
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:2, Informative)
Re:what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a concept... (Score:2, Informative)
On second thought, it'll never catch on. Too much research involved in research.
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:2, Informative)
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 £1
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:2)
What makes you think that Encarta is not biased?
Back in 2002, we had a certain amount of discussions about Encarta's texts about some middle-eastern country and its population. Have you ever tried to fix an error in the Encarta?
http://www.klick-nach-rechts.de/gegen-rechts/20
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:2, Insightful)
Encarta is edited by professional editors, and as such it has a standard of integrity which Microsoft's customers expect.
Wikipedia is edited by bored Internet users, and as such it bears a disclaimer that it is "for entertainment purposes only."
I would much sooner trust Encarta than Wikipedia for encyclopedic knowledge, in much the same way that I'd trust any other journalistic source [nypost.com] than a bunch of bored Internet users [wikinews.org] to edit my news.
"free but biased Wikipedia?" (Score:5, Informative)
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:[tt]:Encarta (Score:3, Insightful)
Meythinks you are a fool!
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:5, Funny)
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:5, Informative)
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:[tt]:Encarta (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm searching the WORLD WIDE WEB here not the canadian web. Sometimes its usefull but for the most part i find it a pain.
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:3, Informative)
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!
Re:[tt]:Encarta (Score:2, Insightful)
I really can't wait until the time comes when Google is obsolete, and we instead have thousands of stories about a different company that say "OMG JHOIM INTRODUCES USENET SEARCH! WOOT!"
Better results than Google? (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone else noticing this?
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: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.
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:2)
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:3, Funny)
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:Better results than Google? (Score:5, Funny)
I've never quite understood the importance of that. How is that a "win?" Did you get to the 1.2 millionth result and say "goddamn, I need more pages!" ?
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:2)
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Better results than Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
"12 inches in centimeters"
MSN Search gives you the answer.
Yes, MSN Search does have that feature. It may not be as good as Google's version, but it's there.
What they'd actually be saying... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, this crap stinks, but it takes too much time to configure my own.
Well, I don't really like this crap, but MS makes the best bowls and I really need a bowl for my salad so I guess I'll just have to take the bundle.
Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Can't see what this would possibly give over Google or other great search engines. What possible benefit could Microsoft give to this that is not already there? Why bother reinventing the wheel, except for the purpose of desktop domination?
First post?
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Actual facts with minimal bias compared to wikipedia.
Billy come lately.... (Score:2, Funny)
You can't win if you don't play.
A better question would be: Why is Microsoft working on a "desktop search tool"? Yahoo, I can can see, but Microsoft? They produce the damn OS, which has a search built into it!!! Maybe they are going to have an animated cat this tim
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)
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 returne
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.
search results vs google (Score:5, Funny)
google: "bill gates sucks" - 2,460 matches
Not really shocking, I guess.
Re:search results vs google (Score:2)
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:Browser Locales (Score:3, Informative)
In any case, it's no
Re:search results vs google (Score:2)
google search: Bill Gates ate my balls - 47,000
Interestingly enough, the first page on google are all "ate my balls" references, including some Bill Gates bought my balls which I don't even remember. Sadly, MSN search included such things as a complete listing of 2600 cartridges, and has no real balls to it.
Re:search results vs google (Score:2)
Google Search: 224,000,000 for linux [definition]. (0.11 seconds)
Google is faster and returns more results. Plus MSN only shows 8 per page instead of 10.
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.
Re:Is this REALLY launched this time? (Score:2)
[tt]:Is this REALLY launched this time? (Score:5, Insightful)
With Microsoft, who gives a shit? Remember their "big security push"? Nothing came of it. Everyone who has a clue knows you can't just "bolt on" security in a couple of months. It was all about marketing, not product. Just like monkey-boy's "developers, developers, developers" - all hype, no content.
I checked the server logs at work yesterday, and for every legit visitor over the last 10 days there were 8 attempts to "hack in" using Winblows security holes (stupid script kiddies - why don't you at least check to see what OS is running before repeatedly trying different methods - oh, right, you're Microsnot Fanbois).There's a LOT of msnbots (MicroSoft Nuisance roBOTs) out there.
Instead of wasting time and resources on a search engine, they should first fix their piece of shit insecure operating system. Or maybe they can use google's search engine to find a patch? Buy a clue?
What the world needs isn't a Microsoft search engine - it's for Microsoft to clean up their own mess.
Re:Is this REALLY launched this time? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats good and all, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thats good and all, but... (Score:2)
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but its nice having an alternative to go to when you aren't finding what you want on Google.
Re:Thats good and all, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thats good and all, but... (Score:2)
3078
Re:Thats good and all, but... (Score:2)
3008
Not that I like MSN...
Re:Thats good and all, but... (Score:3, Informative)
$ 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.
MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:2)
Besides which, perhaps the sparseness of bytes on googles site could be more to do with googles 'cheapness' rather than trying to speed up your download. Seriously, with packet switched networks the way they are, a few extra bytes isnt going to mean much to the end user, but probably quite a bit to the search service provider.
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.
Good thing! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good thing! (Score:2)
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
That's progress, right?
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hang on a minute! (Score:3, Funny)
Flee! Flee for your life! (Unless they're brought Jeri Ryan with them.)
Re:Hang on a minute! (Score:2)
All Hail C#! All Hail
msnbot.msn.com going crazy! (Score:3, Informative)
When Google launched I saw my hits go up quite considerably in the space of 6 months.
Re:msnbot.msn.com going crazy! (Score:2)
Re:msnbot.msn.com going crazy! (Score:2)
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.
Ok, obvious question time... (Score:2)
So, what's the MS marketing spin that says their search is better than Google? What's Bill's reason for me to switch?
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.
Re:Doesn't correct my spelling (Score:2)
Re:Doesn't correct my spelling (Score:5, Funny)
You [amazon.com] can't. [dictionary.com]
Before Google, no one knew definitively how to spell anything; it's only recently, since the advent of the Internet, that spelling has been standardized. Fortunately, this makes information exchange much, much easier than during the dark days before 1991.
Indexing gone wild (Score:5, Insightful)
We had to modify our sites to remove session IDs when MSNBot comes by to cut the traffic.
Re:Indexing gone wild (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Nope! Good effort - but F-- (Score:4, Insightful)
I still will be setting the home-page setting of all my users to www.google.com
On a 56K connection Microsoft's effort is still slow and clunky.
i cracked the server and stole the code (Score:3, Funny)
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 use
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
Misleading link (Score:5, Informative)
Come on guys. I know we're all rooting for Google in this fight, but childish tricks like that are just not cricket.
Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has a number of advantages, like:
Also, the layout and the sponsored links are a blatant ripoff of Google.
ya know... (Score:2)
But I'm sure Microsoft is going to bundle it with everything else, so it'll at least be viable if not actually deserving of whatever position it gets.
I will say, though, that paying for hits with Overture was a lot more cost effective than google, even though the hits cost more.
I guess people don't go to google to shop... or at least they don't go there if they know what they want.
Being able to direct a large crowd of peopl
Confusing (Score:2)
See: http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=&FORM=QB HP [msn.com]
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:first impression (Score:3, Informative)
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 que
Wrong link (Score:2)
(Which I btw can't see properly because of bad design from microsoft, but then that was to be expected)
Heh. (Score:2)
Justin.
How to change language? (Score:2)
Re:How to change language? (Score:2)
http://search.msn.com/?noredir=1
Laughable results for "Bill Clinton" (Score:2)
Just repeated the test I did [slashdot.org] when the Accoona [accoona.com] search engine came out in 2004-12: a search on the name "Bill Clinton":
The top result on MSN search [msn.com] is from a .biz domain called The Nostradamus Mabus Project: In Search of the Anti-Christ [mabus.biz]. Anti-trust jokes aside, this is a crazy result, and makes anyone looking for serious information reach for the page down key immediately.
In contrast, the top result on Google [google.com] is Bill Clinton's official White House biography.
I'll stop using google when (Score:2)
A search for my name brings up my site (Score:2)
Probably because I mention Bill Gates on my homepage, in reference to My Meeting Bill Gates Photo [muldoon.us].
It is the little things in life..
Broken in Firefox! (Score:2)
Fuck these guys at Microsoft who purposefully break shit on people.
Unification post! (Score:2)
No!
MSNS rocks! Google sucks!
No!
Truth: competition is good.
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)
uilt by microsoft... (Score:3, Funny)
is this a feature or a warning?
i'm not a particularly avid microsoft basher and i have nothing against using their software when it's the best tool for the job. still, i have to say that based on my experience, pretty much all of their good software was acquired from other sources. anything that they wrote themselves from the ground up (or have significantly re-written since acquiring it) tends to be, well, less than stellar.
Re:But it still can't find (Score:2, Funny)
Re:really launched ? (Score:2)
Video [hedweb.com], for you custard-pie-throwing Belgian anarchist wannabes...