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MSN Search Has Arrived
strikehosting writes "The new MSN Search, "the first-ever search engine built from the ground up by Microsoft", has been launched worldwide. It will be available in 25 markets and 10 languages.
A few features though, like MSN Music and 'Search Near Me', are available only in the United States.
Sporting a cleaner look and a simplified layout, MSN Search has a more prominent position on the home page. The features that are available here include tabs that allow consumers to target searches to the Web, news, images, music, desktop or Microsoft Encarta."
Microsoft still hopes that people will buy the Encarta software for additional tools not included in the search engine, such as a guide that helps children finish their homework. The Encarta features will make a huge difference in setting MSN Search apart from rivals, said Charlene Li, an analyst tracking the search industry for Forrester. "Here is this objective, fact-based information that you need," she said. "It's really hard to find that objective point of view" online.
For one, the use of the online Encarta isn't completely free. If you make an Encarta search, you'll notice a clock ticking in the left side of the screen: you only have two hours of "free" Encarta (remember, kids, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, especially coming from Microsoft). It seems that it won't stay free for long.
So, here's the dilemma: should one use non-free but objective Encarta or free but biased Wikipedia?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
msnbot.msn.com hit my web site no less than 10,661 times last month so I'll be interested to see what difference this has on my vistor numbers.
When Google launched I saw my hits go up quite considerably in the space of 6 months.
Come on guys. I know we're all rooting for Google in this fight, but childish tricks like that are just not cricket.
One BIG difference I've noticed is that MSN search doesn't ignore sites with query strings in the URL. My entire site uses them, so it's pretty obvious in the logs, the MSN bot is the only thing spidering past the front page. If I want Google to index my site, I'd have to set up URL rewriting, which my shared web host doesn't allow. If you want to find information on my website, MSN search is the only way to get it right now if it's not on the front page.
Of course, the order that the results are returned in is total crap, and that's what most people notice.
On second thought, it'll never catch on. Too much research involved in research.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
You might try:
$ lynx -source http://search.msn.com/ | wc -c
3008
Doesn't seem too bad to me.
Of course, it doesn't prove your point using misleading data.
Google has a really good feature for me, as a researcher, that I don't see in MSN: searching into pdf files. In a simple search for a title of a paper of my research group, the results in Google where more accurate, with the paper (in pdf format) as a result, and results in citeseer too. A search for words in the abstract resulted in papers related to my work too. I think that in searches more specific than "Linux" or "Microsoft", Google still wins.
Please note that Wikipedia's number one rule is called NPOV for "neutral point of view", before you go accusing it of widespread bias left and right. Not that it always lives up to the goal of being entirely bias-free, but I'd hardly call Encarta unbiased either, and it makes no claim that objectivity is an object.
And it's not like the two are mutually exclusive, either. If you have Encarta, you can still look up stuff on Wikipedia, compare and contrast their approaches, and learn more from the profit.
But Encarta probably is more suitable for children, because Wikipedia makes little effort to self-censor offensive material that you may not want your child to know about.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Google does the exact same thing, mind you. They have the Google API that lets you programmatically issue search requests but you need a license (granted, it's free) and are limited to 1,000 queries per day. That query limit is Google's way of ensuring it's only used by hobbyists/small-time folks, which, IMHO, is essentially the same thing MS's disclaimer is trying to enforce.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
In any case, it's not really the point how it figures out I'm in Holland. I later noticed that for many searches, the top results returned are from .nl sites. It's an interesting strategy to be very region specific, but I really don't like that it pollutes my search as well. When I for instance type "Genetic Programming" (a subject I'm interested in), the first result I get is genetic-programming.org, the main page of John Koza from Stanford. The subsequent three hits are (English) pages on .nl domains, then genetic-programming.com, and again a lot of hits within the .nl domain (all in English as this is an international research area). This is totally unacceptable, and makes the thing completely unusable. I don't think pure regional search engines are the way to go, and the fact that I can't change it really infuriates me. I've tried a couple of research subjects more and they all bring me to .nl sites, not to authorative international sites. This is really bad.
Welcome to Microsoft's regionet: where do you want to stay put today?
Did you bother atleast loading the search page? Microsoft Search is not exactly slow or bloated.