Microsoft's New Search Engine

[jbgilbert]

If you have not heard, Microsoft is developing their own search engine and has tentatively announced a late 3rd quarter release.

They have made the alpha version available for testing at: http://techpreview.search.msn.com/

Notice on the front page they "ask for feedback". I'm not sure if they will listen, but this is your one change to communicate with MSN prior to the release of the new engine.

Trust me, they have heard from me several times. So far I'm not overly impressed, but I probably should not expect too much of an alpha release.

Test the alpha and tell these guys what you think -- good and bad.

[pne]

Au contraire, mon ami!

I'm top five or better for all my key phrases on alpha search, couldn't be better!

Seriously though, it seems more than a little crude. MSN bot has been visiting regularly but search seems even less sophisticated than altavista.

pne

[jbgilbert]

pne.. make sure you provide MSN with feedback.

But, remember... don't tell them it's great just because your rankings are currently great.

Your rankings could disappear in the beta or production version... lol, but with some truth to it.

[Jerry]

I've seen the msn bot hit my site several times over the past week or two, but am NOT getting many relevant results from any of the searches I entered.

the only time I saw our site in their results was when I queried against our company name.

[OneMoreBite]

Way too green to bother giving feedback now, IMO. Don't know what they are using for an algo but the results were so sorry azz it's not funny. My search for "weight loss" brought all of 15 results, most of which weren't relevant.

I think part of what keeps Google on top is their team obviously uses the Internet. It's not just about outspending the other guy but figuring out what people need before they know they need it.

Kathryn

[jbgilbert]

I don't mean to be negative, but I am really surprised at the number of post I have seen from people calling the alpha search "good".

I've tried very hard to analyze the alpha results in an unbiased way and I just cannot come up with that rating???

[OneMoreBite]

I'm with you JB. I'd give it an F- at present.

Kathryn

[pne]

Yeah, you're right. In spite of the above post I think they're way off the mark.

pne

[sfowler]

I've just got to like a search engine that puts me at the top of the listings, but I am still not very impressed overall. Still, I am used to the alpha versions of equipment from my R&D people, so if it works at all it's a good start. The site is there, it produces results on search, so at least the designers remembered it should be a search engine. You've just not worked with enough software designers!

[cyanide]

I can't believe it got moved out of beta... or is alpha a downgrade? ....

Yeah, I've done some testing.
On one of my searches, for example... Pages from one domain came up in 16 of the top 30 results !!
Not very promising so far

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by cyanide

I can't believe it got moved out of beta... or is alpha a downgrade?

Yes, alpha would be a "downgrade" if it happened that way but it doesn't.

The terminology refers to early test versions of software - alpha versions precede beta versions, just as alpha precedes beta in the alphabet. Alpha versions are generally restricted to in-house testing so generally by the time the public sees a version it is at least beta, as is the case here. After the beta version comes "release candidates", as in RC1, RC2, etc., as we are seeing with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (beta -> RC1 -> the current RC2).

Pages from one domain came up in 16 of the top 30 results

That was a common finding when the techpreview was first publicized. However, MSNBot has indeed been very active - on sites I monitor it has been second only to Googlebot in spidering - and those multiple listings are becoming less common. In fact, when checking perhaps 8-10 search terms this morning, I only saw that with one - earlier, I was seeing it on virtually every search.

It's pretty clear that the new MSN Search is being refined, tweaked, and improved on an ongoing basis. It's still far from perfect but I'm impressed with how much improvement it's shown in a short time.

[minstrel]

From the microsoft.public.msn.search newsgroup:

Originally Posted by Eytan Seidman [MSFT

]MSN Search Technology Preview FAQ
Thanks to all offering their feedback. Here is a mini-FAQ that may answer some frequently asked questions about the results you are seeing and how to query the engine.

Q. I am seeing a lot of results from the same domain. What is up with that?
A. You will notice that when you do a query we often return many results from the same domain. This was a tough call and we decided to ship the Technology Preview without this feature. We wanted to get the product out in order to get early user feedback. We definitely heard that this is critical and we will improve in this area. In general, we released the Technology Preview very early so there a number of features we intend to build that are not currently present.

Q. Why are there so few pages when I query for "pancake schnizzle"?
A. Our current index only has about one billion documents. There are bound to be documents on the web that we do not have. When we release the production version we will have many more documents and intend to be comprehensive on content selection.

Q. The site is slow or I am getting errors. Why is that?
A. Yep, that is definitely possible. We are learning what it means to run a search service end to end and to return results in a few hundred milliseconds. If you query at 8pm in the evening we promise it will be quite zippy :)

Q. What are some of the advanced commands that the search engine has?
A. We could have done a better job of documenting this. If you want to restrict your query to a specific domain you can issue a query such as "site:microsoft.com windows development" (without the quotes). That will query the index for "windows development" (not in a phrasal), but will restrict the query to only those hosts on the microsoft.com domain. You can also find all of the pages that point to a page by entering, for example, "link:http://www.microsoft.com/". This will return all pages that point to microsoft.com.

Feel free to post questions, etc.

eytan

[cyanide]

Yeah, I was being a little facetious about the apha-beta thing.

But, yes I too have seen the msnbot a lot more active in the past week or so, so hopefully some good things to come.
I'd love nothing more than to see msn really step up

Nice find on the msn FAQ. Atleast they're aware