MSN Search Preview 2 Up

[dannysullivan]

MSN's opened up its new search engine again. Gary's got a post here: Second MSN Search Tech Preview with links and news.

[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

[seobook]

Originally Posted by 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

[Nacho]

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.

[Dodger]

Originally Posted by seobook

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?

[dannysullivan]

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.

[doppelganger]

I've been having trouble accessing it...

[kenpomachine]

Originally Posted by Nacho

[*]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?

[Chris Sherman]

Originally Posted by kenpomachine

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!

Originally Posted by kenpomachine

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

[Dodger]

Originally Posted by dannysullivan

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!

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.

[Dodger]

Danny - the article citing Gates 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 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".

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by seobook

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.

[kenpomachine]

Originally Posted by Chris Sherman

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.

[Nacho]

Originally Posted by kenpomachine

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.

[kenpomachine]

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.

[Dodger]

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.

[Webmaster-Toolkit.com]

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

[Dodger]

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. 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. 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.

[republicrat]

It's UP again......

Tech Preview Search MSN

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

[rustybrick]

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