New MSN Search Goes LIVE in Beta!

[Nacho]

Its finally here! Feeeuuuuuu! This confirms last night's thread with the rumors then.

Today Chris Sherman made a great review titled Microsoft Unveils its New Search Engine - At Last:

The new engine, available at beta.search.msn.com is an algorithmic search engine built from scratch by Microsoft engineers. "This is our new engine that we've built from the ground up," said Justin Osmer, product manager for MSN Search. Released in beta form, it's expected to replace Yahoo search results still in place at MSN sometime later this year or early next year.

So, what do you think of the new MSN Search (beta)?

[Nacho]

As most will rush to view their website analytics software for new traffic from MSN, please keep in mind that http://www.msn.com which hast most of it is still using http://search.msn.com and not the new beta.

So if your new rankings are great, GOOD. Do what you can to keep the up there.

If your rankings are low, don't panic. Start doing your research and testing. I have a feeling you might have enough time to get them back up without really hurting your stats and results.

[copsewood]

Originally Posted by Nacho

So, what do you think of the new MSN Search (beta)?

Not much. They'll have to make it less demanding on websites if many admins are not going to block it. I welcome competition against google but not from a company with a long criminal history of programming hooks into their systems to disable competitors' software.

[orion]

From this end, the beta version is giving

This site is temporarily unavailable, please check back soon.

Orion

[rustybrick]

Me too Orion.

[JohnGalt]

It's frustrating, and I would have thought ms would have made it much more bullet proof. This is not getting off to a good start. I was checking some of my rankings on the pre-release versions of the new msn search, and I was starting to get the (good) feeling that they had possibly found a way to filter out obvious cloaking attempts. One of my main competitors uses cloaking and by doing so has pushed me down below him in google, whereas I used to be way ahead of him. In my ideal world, msn search will be so good that it will eliminate those who attempt to show one thing to bots and another to "real" visitors. Is this too much to hope for?

You gotta be kidding. The site has been down for 2 hours for me this morning.

[hiero]

Isn't it just like Microsoft to launch something new that's not ready for Prime Time! (even though it's still in beta why all the fan faire if it's not ready). Pretty embarrassing to get excited about something new Microsoft only to be disappointed to find that it's not currently working.

Plz see article at:
http://www.marketingshift.com/2004/1...esults-for.cfm
for some serious questions about the 'bots & engine, and my 'concur' comments re recent 404 hits to technically non-existent files.

[inlogicalbearer]

One 25 try this morning I got only one result working.
After the blue screen of the Microsoft OS the orange sentense of MSN Search ;-)

[Nacho]

Originally Posted by truba

You gotta be kidding. The site has been down for 2 hours for me this morning.

They probably saw the Business 2.0 article the other day that read:

Originally Posted by Business2.0

" . . .many of the standard plot devices of tech startup triumph: the clever spotting of an overlooked opportunity, the crashing server -- the server always crashes -- the plucky victory in the end."

Common' Microsoft you did not build this engine in a garage! Let's not play "pretend" here.

[rustybrick]

MSN responded at their blog http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/arch...11/255802.aspx

[orion]

I'm happy to see is working fine for integrated optimization

The explanation

"In the process of making our new MSN Search beta broadly available we experienced some technical difficulties that caused the beta service to function improperly or be unavailable for some users for periods of time."

Doesn't say much. Either this was an internal problem, external or created by who knows. Hard to tell, but we cannot speculate either. I'm just happy to see Microsoft in the search arena.


Orion

[AussieWebmaster]

Okay do a search for this term: more evil than satan

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.a...atan&FORM=QBRE


Guess paybacks are a bitch.

http://searchenginewatch.com/serepor...le.php/2167621

[rustybrick]

Good find there.

[orion]

How about this one

better than God


Orion

[Nacho]

I do see that fresher pages rank higher on the serps. Anyone noticing the same?

[vicaya]

Click "+Search Builder" and then "Result Ranking", you'll see 3 sliders for proximity, popularity and freshness, which introduce these {..} operators in the query. And they do affect results significantly.

Cool.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by Nacho

I do see that fresher pages rank higher on the serps. Anyone noticing the same?

Good catch... obviously the big impact is lower off page and higher on page... I wonder what the turn around time is for refreshing the SERPs.... could be an interesting battle for position prior to going live on the MSN portal.

[orion]

Interesting, isn’t it? Just the opposite of conspiracy theories and other search engines.

business rumors
term vector
keywords co-occurrence
on topic analysis
javascript optimization
color optimization
website validations
security optimization


Will they drop my other test pages that are not new? Will see if MSN pass these tests.


Orion