MSN's opened up its new search engine again. Gary's got a post here: Second MSN Search Tech Preview (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041001-189) with links and news.

I like the LOOK..

Well done MSN.

Obviously still in BETA as the results are abit off..

"Web Results 1-10 of about 18,381,343 containing toronto website design"

The results look very similar to GOOGLE's - odd...??

Anyone when when we can expect this to go live?

They also have a toolbar, found here:
http://toolbar.msn.com/

Cheers

CRITTER

I like the LOOK..

Well done MSN.

Obviously still in BETA as the results are abit off..

"Web Results 1-10 of about 18,381,343 containing toronto website design"

The results look very similar to GOOGLE's - odd...??

Anyone when when we can expect this to go live?

They also have a toolbar, found here:
http://toolbar.msn.com/

Cheers

CRITTER
Andy Beal pointed out that they are sponsering SES Chicago in mid December, so they might be out before the end of that?

I did only a few queries, but it looks like they still are weighted rather heavily on page copy or their link algorithms are not too sophisticated yet

Here are a list of 2nd round observations:

Keyword-in-domain continues being strong, but not as much as Round 1.
Cache is as fresh as your grocery store around the corner.
Improved navigation and nicer looks.
The index seems to have been growing nicely.
link:www.domain.com is working well too.
Big authority websites carry weight in ranking. Seems like mom & pop will continue to struggle.
On page factors and content weigh in heavily.
Results for other languages are not coming up well (I tried Spanish).

This is what I have so far to report. I'll keep testing and post here.

Andy Beal pointed out that they are sponsering SES Chicago in mid December, so they might be out before the end of that?

I can't remember where I read it, but Bill Gates was quoted to saying that they would like to have Search roll out before the end of the year. This was several months ago when he was speaking somewhere.

I cannot get into the Tech Preview at all -- am getting a "connection was refused" error in my browser. What is up with that? Is this thing still available to view?

See the blog item, then the reference to the story I wrote on first tech release. Pretty sure I have them on the record there about being up before the end of the year. If not, yes -- can confirm that's the plan as I've been told.

I've been having trouble accessing it...

Results for other languages are not coming up well (I tried Spanish).


I can't comment on the second preview as the techpreview url didn't work for me.

But the results in the search.msn.es are almost identical to those of Yahoo (+-1 position). Maybe they haven't so much developed a new SE as swichted one for the other?

I can't comment on the second preview as the techpreview url didn't work for me.

They're still testing, bringing the service up and taking it down to make sure their load balancing is working properly. Watch the blog for "official" notice when they go live -- soon!


But the results in the search.msn.es are almost identical to those of Yahoo (+-1 position). Maybe they haven't so much developed a new SE as swichted one for the other?

No, it's a brand new crawler, written from scratch. Remember -- it's new, so MSN hasn't had a lot of time to tweak it. It's still very much in the "proof of concept" stage, so don't draw too many conclusions as yet.

Chris

See the blog item, then the reference to the story I wrote on first tech release. Pretty sure I have them on the record there about being up before the end of the year. If not, yes -- can confirm that's the plan as I've been told.

I knew I read it somewhere! :D

I think there was mention of it in a thread here as well and somebody said it would be like other MicroSoft product releases -- buggy! That is when I said, expect to see Microsoft Search SP1 in early March. ;)

Danny - the article citing Gates (http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3376041) saying "later this year" (July 2004)

In many ways, MSN Search is in a holding pattern until it gets a heart transplant of Microsoft's own search technology later this year, a time Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has stated. At that time, there will almost certainly be other changes and capabilities to the site's advanced search page or in how it operates.

You were quoting from a ZDNet article (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5249975.html) in which Gates said:

Microsoft's chairman told a media briefing here that the company had "several milestones with its search site" on the way.

"In July, the format of the site will change--and so will the quality of what you get--and the way it'll look is dramatically improved," Gates said. "It'll be later this year that we actually roll out what's entirely our own back-end driving the search".

Andy Beal pointed out that they are sponsering SES Chicago in mid December, so they might be out before the end of that?

I read that, and I'm almost thinking: "personal appearance by Bill Gates at SES, to announce launch new MSN Search, and promote use of MSN Toolbar."

Maybe I should get a ticket? Darn it - knew I should've applied for a passport long ago.

No, it's a brand new crawler, written from scratch. Remember -- it's new, so MSN hasn't had a lot of time to tweak it. It's still very much in the "proof of concept" stage, so don't draw too many conclusions as yet.

Chris

What I meant is that in their spanish search site they haven't implemented the new one yet.
I hope they do the change at the same time worldwide, though.

What I meant is that in their spanish search site they haven't implemented the new one yet.
I hope they do the change at the same time worldwide, though.
I believe this is part of the plan as I reported back in August during the SES San Jose Coverage: MSN's approach on Multilingual Search Markets (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=924).

Thanks Nacho, what they told you is basically how things worked before people began learning that Google results were more relevant than MSN.
Better be a good SE this time if they don't want to lose more of their captive public.

The site is unreachable now. Used to get at least the splash screen saying it was temporarily closed.

I am wondering if this activity has anything to do with the Search Champ Camp going on right now? Maybe they are doing live testing with these folks.

I went thru a half-hour guinea pig test with them years ago for Win 95. It is a strange feeling too, they sit on the other side of two-way mirror and film you, record you -- ask you to talk out loud about what you are seeing, feeling, doing, etc. (lots of times, I kept forgetting -- going too ga-ga over what I was looking at). "Okay, I am clicking on this menu item .... " .... "Uh, Mr. Dodger, try clicking your right mouse button" .... "Holy S4!t ... kewl man!"

So I can see these Search Champs possibly going thru the same type of experiment, and thus, the site going up and down all the time they are being run through the testing. But now ... they shut the outside traffic off from viewing the site while they are conducting these tests.

A 3rd free spidering index to research and conquer will certainly bring back the good old days. Hurry up and roll it out M$!

There is another server running at MSN Search runs under the name of "underdog". Seems that this server has had a couple of links pointing to it at one time for MSNbot to pick up on (http://techpreview.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=%22underdog.search.msn.com%22). Actually I know where the links are coming from, because they were using it to do searches from and I spotted it in the referral logs.

Underdog is unavailable and the caches do not reveal anything.

BTW, if you are having a problem looking at the cache at Tech Preview -- it is because they are using an IP address which may not be available at any given time.To get around that though, substitute the IP address in the link with techpreview.search.msn.com in its place.

If the Tech Preview goes down, I saved a cached page here (http://gonzo.ipupdater.com/misc/webstractions/insidegoogle-msn-cache.html). What is also interesting about this one page is that you will see the CSS that is on the page in between the STYLE element tags. That is pretty curious that those would show up.

Also, Google Ads work on cached pages. Not sure if this is the case inside of Yahoo cached pages, but Google caches do show PSA's in their place.

It's UP again......

Tech Preview Search MSN (http://techpreview.search.msn.com/)

The "look" is kinda like Google........

I like some of the results I checked. But then if I like them, others might not. :)

Appears MSN is picking up content quite fast. A post I made on seroundtable friday about Mike Grehans article is already in a search I did for the site and title. Pretty good thing to see.

thanks for the heads up!

I did not have enough time to do heavy testing, so this is just speculating, but here goes:

1) Index continues to be fresh. Cache pages are 24 hrs for some and 3 days for other sites, but thats a mighty efficient bot!

2) Limit search query to 15 words, not bad.

3) Combinations of "site:www.domain1.com link:http://www.domain2.com" work well.

4) Both "allinurl" and "allinanchor" does not work.

5) IMO, and not enough testing, but I think the algorithm is too simple with a main focus on on-page elements first, off-page second. Here are on-page highlights in order of importance:

title
keyword prominence
KW in URL
<h1>
<h2> - One or the other, no need to have both h1 and h2
bold once
alt - helps but not a sure factor

6) Limiting slurp to 2 billion based on these test queries:

2,000,000,000 containing the
2,000,000,000 containing .com
2,000,000,000 containing www

7) Backlink check works, but seems low compared to Yahoo! and high to Google:

MSN -> 831 containing link:http://www.domain.com
Google -> 358 linking to link:http://www.domain.com
Yahoo! -> 7,370 for link:http://www.domain.com

8) Sample index size for documents with "blue house" in quotes is competitive:

MSN -> 230,282 containing "blue house"
Yahoo! -> 268,000 for "blue house"
Google -> 304,000 for "blue house"

9) Search results are faster, but I don't have a comparison speed test to prove any actial numbers.

That's it for me to report for this 3rd round of testing. You can go ahead and do your own conclusions, I can not give any recommendations at this time, sorry, except for . . . MSN is looking sharp and I can't wait for launching day.

Nice analysis Nacho!

Cache pages are 24 hrs for some and 3 days for other sites

I agree, but on two sites I checked that have dates published on the site, it was longer than 5-7 days from last week.

A cursory look at the results of a few personal searches, suggests to myself that the MSN engine pays particular attention to exact anchor text, without fiddling about with the weighting so much as Google. It's showing superb results for a couple of non-commercial reference sites I admin.

Overall, the results are pretty good. I would consider them a serious threat (or opportunity)

A couple of things I noticed.
- Seems relatively easy to SEO
- Authorities do not dominate top rankings for a wide range of keywords as they do in G. Authorities are pushed down a bit and niche sites seem to rank tops for their target keywords. (ie. keyword-keyword2.com sites)
- Does not seem to catch near duplicate sites
- An authoratative hub that I watch in G is penalized or banned. It doesn't rank at all.
- Number of in-bound links does not seem as important as anchor text/internal text.

Authorities do not dominate top rankings for a wide range of keywords as they do in G. Authorities are pushed down a bit and niche sites seem to rank tops for their target keywords.
I agree with this observation, because from the little testing I was able to do, on-page factors weigh more than their link popularity algorithm, which is contrary to Google's overall algorithm. However, with their testing for new link algorithms seen out in the open and who knows what's in closed doors, I strongly believe that MSN's algo today will not be the same for full launch. I wish optimizing for MSN will be a little more challanging and make it more fun ;)

Index continues to be fresh. Cache pages are 24 hrs for some and 3 days for other sites, but thats a mighty efficient bot! Going into great depth and quite often. In logs on two different sites, MSN suddenly has more than twice the bandwidth usage of all the other bots combined.

Slurp on the other hand basically comes in and sniffs a few pages and goes away... kind of like an old arthritic hound dog that just can't get the energy up for a good hunt.

Looks like there's been a big change in the algorithm since I last posted on results - link pop seems more processed than before.

More processed? As in more links are showing up? That might be. I did just a couple of precursory checks and the "total results" figures are quite large, larger than Yahoo would be.

I am still not trusting those figures though. After you move ahead a few pages, the total changes to something else.

To me, MSN new search engine is yesterday's Google. My lost high rankings in GG before now have come back to MSN. So, I must love it and wish it goes alive the sooner the better.