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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.
For the few searches I've used MSN for, it seems to have better results than Google.
Anyone else noticing this?
Can't see what this would possibly give over Google or other great search engines. What possible benefit could Microsoft give to this that is not already there? Why bother reinventing the wheel, except for the purpose of desktop domination?
First post?
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
msn search: "bill gates sucks" - 608 matches
google: "bill gates sucks" - 2,460 matches
Not really shocking, I guess.
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.
It seams like it can
They just don't get it. The reason people use Google is because it loads fast and just works. It doesn't take forever to load with flash animations, and other crap no one needs. When you want to search you go to Google. If you want to be bombarded with media and advertisements there are plenty of other sites on the internet.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
I know people keep posting stuff along the lines of "oh deary me... this might kill Google", but no. It doesn't have to. MSN Search may take market share away from Google, but the people using it will be the ones who haven't figured out how to change the default search in IE, or set the homepage to something other than MSN. So, Google will hopefully become a search engine for the clueful, whilst the AOLers and WebTV people use MSN search.
The first result for "linux" is an actual page devoted to Linux this time.
That's progress, right?
Three Borg stories in a row? Has Slashdot been assimilated?
Flee! Flee for your life! (Unless they're brought Jeri Ryan with them.)
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.
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
We had to modify our sites to remove session IDs when MSNBot comes by to cut the traffic.
I have noticed over the last few months that the MSN Bot has been a far more frequent crawler around my site than the Google Bot which was previously far and away the most active crawler which visited me.
Anyway for various phrases my site comes out in the number one position whereas on Google it's somewhere down in 10th place. To be fair though I am not sure my site is the best resource for these particular phrases.
It's certainly fast as well.
I still will be setting the home-page setting of all my users to www.google.com
On a 56K connection Microsoft's effort is still slow and clunky.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I clicked on the picture of a smiling Mr Gates and he told me to "type in your question", so I was expecting an ask.com type search, but the results looked like any other search engine, and it did a very bad job of answering my question.
Also, the result page was in Dutch, because it noticed that I'm in Holland, but there was no obvious link to switch to English like Google has. Presumably Google knows I prefer English because of my browser settings.
Also, there appears to be an RSS feed, but it's not useful enough for Firefox to recognise it.
I notice this robot has index my site, even protected by a robots.txt file.
:D :grin:
What the world its come? arghh..
Fortunally enough my site its not compatible with IE
-Woof woof woof!
Well, searching for 'linux' only gives me Dutch pages. While I am Dutch, and on a Dutch network, if I do not check the 'search for pages in Dutch' box, shouldn't I get English pages?
This alone is reason enough not to use it in most cases.
But the look is clean enough, and it looks like no sponsored links on the "linux" keyword.
I just did a search for
:)
ShellExecute microsoft
and a number of variations, and on the MS search, I didn't get any MS sites in the top few entries.
the same search in google brings up the correct msdn documentation as #1
Still unsure of the quality of other searches, but competition is good
liqbase
Come on guys. I know we're all rooting for Google in this fight, but childish tricks like that are just not cricket.
Google has a number of advantages, like:
- Repeat the search on USENET, Images and Froogle
- No heavy graphics
- Spell checking
- Indexes and converts PDF and other formats.
Also, it returned results from the United Kingdom, even though the UK only box wasn't ticked!Also, the layout and the sponsored links are a blatant ripoff of Google.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
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.
With Microsoft, who gives a shit? Remember their "big security push"? Nothing came of it. Everyone who has a clue knows you can't just "bolt on" security in a couple of months. It was all about marketing, not product. Just like monkey-boy's "developers, developers, developers" - all hype, no content.
I checked the server logs at work yesterday, and for every legit visitor over the last 10 days there were 8 attempts to "hack in" using Winblows security holes (stupid script kiddies - why don't you at least check to see what OS is running before repeatedly trying different methods - oh, right, you're Microsnot Fanbois).There's a LOT of msnbots (MicroSoft Nuisance roBOTs) out there.
Instead of wasting time and resources on a search engine, they should first fix their piece of shit insecure operating system. Or maybe they can use google's search engine to find a patch? Buy a clue?
What the world needs isn't a Microsoft search engine - it's for Microsoft to clean up their own mess.
On second thought, it'll never catch on. Too much research involved in research.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Until now, Google was my preferred search engine, so that is what I am comparing against.
I clicked the link in the story, which brings up the main MSN page. It's yet another site that doesn't use the whole browser width (and that is getting really annoying). It's also full of crap I'm not interested in (more on that below) and I notice that it tried to pop something up.
There's an ad for their search, so I clicked that, but it redirects via atdmt.com, which is either a tracker site or an ad site. Either way, it was on my blocklist, so the browser went nowhere.
So far, not impressed.
Then it occurred to me that the search site is probably separate from the main MSN site, so I tried search.msn.com. Lo and behold, a lightweight page for entering my search query, in a similar manner to Google's. No ads on this page either! I liked that. OK, so the URL is a little longer than Google's, but these days I do my searching from that input field in the top-right corner of Konqueror/Firefox.
It also correctly detected which country I'm in - presumably from the IP address or hostname. (The MSN main page didn't, and gave me loads of US-centric stuff instead, which is what I meant by stuff I'm not interested in.) It also used localised text for the country I'm in (German). That's all well and good, but my browser settings actually specify en-gb first, so they get a point for being clever and detecting the country, but lose 10 points for completely ignoring my own preferences. I would expect the page in German if I went to msn.de, but the .com one shouldn't make such assumptions.
I tried searching for a few various things, and compared the results to Google. It seemed that some of the more obscure terms had better results in the MSN search. Certainly, each of the two would return a different set of results for the same query. I can't really say that one was definately better than the other - this is one of those things you have to try for yourself, and it will probably only become apparent after a non-trivial amount of usage.
One other thing that must be said to both MSN and Google: stop using bloody fixed width columns!
I have a screen width of 1280, and in this day and age, much larger sizes are becoming more common. I want the width used more effectively so I don't have to scroll down as much. The HTML isn't even difficult! Annoying things like this give people reason to choose one site over another.
-- Steve
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 ...
the first-ever search engine built from the ground up by Microsoft
is this a feature or a warning?
i'm not a particularly avid microsoft basher and i have nothing against using their software when it's the best tool for the job. still, i have to say that based on my experience, pretty much all of their good software was acquired from other sources. anything that they wrote themselves from the ground up (or have significantly re-written since acquiring it) tends to be, well, less than stellar.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
I don't know what the fuck is about MS that drives people to say or believe such rubbish. If Bill Gates crapped in a bowl, someone like would be posting:
Well, this crap stinks, but it takes too much time to configure my own.
Well, I don't really like this crap, but MS makes the best bowls and I really need a bowl for my salad so I guess I'll just have to take the bundle.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
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.
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.
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?