New MSN Search with different results for Spanish queries

[Nacho]

I've been testing with the New MSN Search a lot lately and I'm quite impressed. I like very much what Ken Moss and his team have done to incorporate the Spanish version by increasing awareness with the Hispanic market.

From recent tests, I've noticed that a search in the open engine has a similar but a different repository index that the Spanish version. Here are some examples (just toggle back and forth from the English and Espanol buttons):

comida mexicana (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=comida+mexicana&FORM=QBHP) - General SE returns 317,361 documents vs. Spanish results have 316,855 documents

autos usados (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=autos+usados&FORM=QBRE) - General 271,272 vs. Spanish 237,379 documents

noticias de mexico (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=noticias+de+mexico&FORM=LTRE) - General 1,256,692 vs. Spanish 1,159,059 documents

luis miguel (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=luis+miguel&FORM=LTRE) - General 3,736,531 vs. Spanish 5,026,638 documents

and just in case anyone doesn't know who the famous celebrity Luis Miguel is . . .

ricky martin (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=ricky+martin&FORM=LTRE) - General 1,059,047 vs. Spanish 2,701,454 documents
So the main questions I have here are:

1) Is MSN Search doing anything special in terms of crawling and indexing for documents related to Spanish compared to their General search results?

2) Is MSN Search ranking documents different with regards to language usage and search preference? Would they have any reason to?

An example of that would be with that last query: Ricky Martin.

For the general search results rickymartin.com is ranked #1 and #2 indented, while rickymartin.publispain.com is ranked #7.

However, for the Spanish results rickymartin.com is ranking #2 and #3 indented, while rickymartin.publispain.com is ranking #1.

So why would MSN Search apply a different ranking algorithm?
3) Will the New MSN Search make documents more relevant depending on multilingual cultures and search habbits or preferences?

4) What can you do to make your pages come up higher for both search types (general & Spanish)? or will it be impossible to rank high #1 for both (for example)?

I still have a lot more testing to do, but please share what you think about all of this.

[Carlos Chacón]

Nacho is right.
First, I tested the New msn search and can not get the results that I had some days ago.
So, I checked the Spanish option to see if I can get those results…but doesn’t happen.
Less results for the Spanish searches…why?
The think that I really do not understand, is why the web results vary if your search is the same keyword-word in both scenarios?

Very interesting, but never mind why that happens…
:confused: