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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."
I keep hearing stories about how they've finally launched their search engine. What does this mean exactly? More specifically, why is it that the search results on:
my.msn.com
Differ from the results on:
search.msn.com
Seems like a really inconsistent launch.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Why doesn't this correct my spelling?
I need to look for a specific word, but I have no idea how to spell it properly.
How can I find what I'm looking for if I don't know how it's spelt?
I'll stick with Google, thanks all the same.
Summation 2
Searching for my first name (very common) and family name (rare), google gives me pages associated with me or some homonym. MSN search gives me pages associated with both names but not on the same line, i.e. not related to me.
Google Image search also gives much more hits than the MSN equivalent.
MSN does not have a spelling checker.
So for these, MSN search is not as good as google.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Yeah, but try going to the new MSN in IE for Mac (OS 9.0). In the grand tradition of Microsoft development, MSN.com looks like complete hell. Way to go Microsoft. Another one out of the park. ;)
Search in both "fonew"
MSN: * Were you looking for fone
Google: Did you mean: phone
so, it does have corrective facilities, but google works better.
Now, the ultimate, searching for "par hiltn"
MSN: * Were you looking for par hilton
Google: Did you mean: paris hilton
Mind you, google does have a special affinity with the woman, so we will let them off.
liqbase
Microsoft always plays this tortoise/hare game with its software. Every few weeks, msn search will get incrementally, imperceptibly better. I remember back in the day, IE was crap and used Netscape. Slowly, I wound up using IE more-and-more until Firefox/Mozilla came along. If the guys at Google stay on their toes and don't become complacent they shouldn't have a problem, though.
Although I do not like Microsoft, for us the consumer, having the two giants smashing at each other for market share is nothing but good. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've felt Google has gotten lazy. Lots of the search results are nothing but sales sites these days ... with all that brain power they brag about, you'd think they could have done something about that by now.
On MSN's side: they're offering search results in RSS format. This is good; but: (and you know there's always a "but" when Bill is involved), their RSS results have usage restrictions:
Copyright © 2005 Microsoft. All rights reserved. These XML results may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner or for any purpose other than rendering MSN Search results within an RSS aggregator for your personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of these results requires express written permission from Microsoft Corporation. By accessing this web page or using these results in any manner whatsoever, you agree to be bound by the foregoing restrictions.
MSN search looks interesting, for now. But I'm not giving up my Google anytime soon.
Having said that: it would be interesting to hear from some MSN people about the architecture: how many servers? What OS? What kind of interconnect? etc.
From what I've tested so far. It seems that it's getting more hits than google in some places, better links in others. Linux and Windows give much more hits in MSN than in Google. Linux searches in MSN tend to focus on the bigger portals rather than the Distros like google. Windows searches are somewhat strange, Google Likes Winzip while MSN likes Winamp on it's first page.
Searching for Firefox, Google wins 17mil to 1.2mil, but the news portion gives much more recent news than google. They both seem to focus on the same pages on the first page however.
Interface wise, you can definetly tell who their trying to emulate. It has a "It's Google with more blue color" Feeling to it. It's cached page content does not do autohighlighting like google, which is a big minus in my opinion. Adjustment wise, I think they got something with the Search Builder, especially with the Result rankings slider.
Overall, it seems like it use use some work search wise, but that could be just because it needs to do some more spidering. Even Google sucked Vs Altavista until it's spidering caught up. Only time will tell.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Furthermore, the first news hit I get for 'Linux' is an article in Computable, "Microsoft: veiligheid van Linux is een mythe". Translated, "Microsoft: safety of Linux is a myth". Second and third news item are ok (skype and cheap linux laptops). I do sense a bit of bias here, but it might be accidental. All in all, a less than happy user has left the MSN site, probably to never return.
Now, why exactly Encarta is less biased than Wikipedia?
Encarta is written by professionals striving to produce unbiased facts. Wikipedia is written by a small core of the same, plus a number of people who more or less know what they're doing and have a vague idea what "unbiased" means, plus a larger number of people who don't know as much as they think they do, plus a small but active swarm of trolls who deliberately introduce misinformation and bias at every opportunity.
The logical conclusion is that Wikipedia will be (a) broader and more up to date, as a result of the greater number of contributors and their more varied backgrounds, and (b) less accurate and objective, as a result of the lesser expertise of many of the contributors and the active sabotage by a small minority. There are thus disadvantages as well as advantages to the wiki approach; only a fool, or a blind fanboy, would deny that.
The only point open to debate is whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. And Microsoft's position - that limited, out-of-date, but reliable information is more valuable than wide, up-to-date, but unreliable information - is a reasonable one to take, whether you personally agree with it or not.
msnbot ate up half my bandwidth allowance in three days when it first started crawling a while back. It's the rudest robot I've ever encountered; Google manage to give me good search results with barely any bandwidth usage, so why MSN has to be so greedy I can't imagine.
Anyway,went straight in my robots.txt. Problem solved.
Come on! That's just unfair. ./lynx -source http://www.msn.com/ | wc -c ./lynx -source http://search.msn.com/ | wc -c ./lynx -source http://www.google.com/ | wc -c
$
37951
$
2907
$
2611
There's no need to misinterpret the data, the result is better for Google anyway.
On Google: The topmost link was a sponsored link from download.com to download Firefox. on MSN Search: The topmost link was a sponsored link from secureie.com. "Download Secure IE Web Browser and Save - www.secureie.com. Compare Secure IE Browser to Firefox and see why it's better. Secure IE seals browser security leaks to provide a faster and..." It's made by a company called Winferno software. I think that was a poor choice of names ...
No, I don't. Sorry about that. I didn't realize at first how confusing that was. What I was saying is that catching students plagiarizing is quite easy with google. Heck, many schools pay big bucks to use software for this exact purpose. It is far easier to simply copy a line from their work into google. Over 50% of the time google will come up with the exact source they copied the work from.