MSN Search Officially Switches To Its Own Technology
Nearly two years after announcing it would develop its own search technology, MSN Search began feeding the general public results found through its own internally developed search engine.
Nearly two years after announcing it would develop its own search technology, MSN Search began feeding the general public results found through its own internally developed search engine.
It’s official. Nearly two years after announcing it would develop its own search technology, MSN Search began feeding the general public results found through its own internally developed search engine. The rollout has happened worldwide, including on the main MSN Search site.
“Now we have our platform in place. We think it’s super competitive to what’s out there,” said MSN Search & Shopping corporate vice president Christopher Payne.
Ousted was long-time search partner Yahoo, in a move that would come as no surprise to that company. While Yahoo no longer supplies the editorial results at MSN Search, paid listings continue to come primarily from Yahoo-owned Overture.
Many, if not most, going to MSN Search over the past week or so have already been exposed to the new technology. Under beta release since last November on a special site, MSN migrated the technology in front of users of its regular sites over the past month.
Now the beta label has come off. MSN Search is firmly in the search wars and hoping that its new technology — along with a massive new advertising campaign — will help it gain users.
What’s MSN Search have to offer? Largely all the same things we wrote about when the beta launched last year in our article, Microsoft Unveils its New Search Engine – At Last. So be sure to give that a read, if you missed it before.
The core search engine is good and a welcomed new “search voice” in the space. However, it does not make a massive leap beyond what’s offered by Google, Yahoo or Ask Jeeves — the other three major search companies that provide their own voices of what’s deemed relevant on the web.
Anything new since the beta came out at the end of last year? A few things:
Now that the big job of getting a crawler-based search engine of its own working on MSN Search is completed, what happens next? I went down a list of possibilities with Payne.
So details on what’s to come are sparse. Payne’s excitement over having reached this important benchmark is anything but.
“The thing I’m most excited about is that now that we have this platform, we’ll be able to innovate on top of it,” Payne said. “We’re going to have rapidfire innovation, things no one’s done yet.”
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