Thursday, November 11, 2004
MSN Beta Search Notes
When a friend asked me what I thought of Microsoft's beta search engine release so far I had to pause. Then I thought, well not much really. You see, it was pretty much down all morning. On one hand I can understand why it got overloaded but on the other hand I think it's quite ridiculous. There has been so much press on the new engine they should've known it was going to get hammered by all sorts of attacks and even actual visitors.Here's what I've found so far.
MSN's Beta Search displays more backlinks, on average, than Google for urls I tested. This isn't good or bad because Google doesn't show all backlinks to a url anyway, this is just an observation.
MSN includes backlinks from blogger's profile page whereas Google doesn't.
Both engines include backlinks that point to pages using a 301 redirect. Checking the backlinks of airgin dot com (my old domain name) on Microsoft search and Google are extremely similar.
MSN lists backlinks to a url even if they aren't all that relevant whereas Google filters theirs (from what I can tell). Example: This marketing shift backlink is link number 348 on a page that has over 1,000 externally pointing links. Honestly, it's not really a high quality backlink but Microsoft includes it anyway. Even the 981st link on the page is showing up in the destination pages backlink count on MSN where as Google shows no backlinks for the url at all.
Note: If msn uses all of these backlinks to help determine a pages relevance and worth then they're probably worse off than Yahoo when it comes to link farms and link spamming.
The 'cached page' feature is almost identical to Google's cached page feature. Microsoft Search reads...
"This is a version of http://www.blogger.com/profile/3104555 as it looked when our crawler examined the site on 11/6/2004. The page you see below is the version in our index that was used to rank this page in the results to your recent query. This is not necessarily the most recent version of the page – to see the most recent version of this page, visit the page on the web.
MSN search is not affiliated with the contents or authors of this page nor responsible for its content."
Google's cached page feature reads...
"This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.blogger.com/profile/3104555 as retrieved on Nov 5, 2004 12:37:48 GMT.G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web.The page may have changed since that time. Click here for the current page without highlighting.This cached page may reference images which are no longer available. Click here for the cached text only.
To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:dpYFaTBT4ooJ:www.blogger.com/profile/3104555+blogger+profile+3104555&hl=en
Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content."
They sure look similar to me.
All in all I'm not really all that impressed with Microsoft Search yet. They're trying to be all things to all people in a single interface and that violates usability rules. Additionally, they have a long way to go before they'll have a competitive advantage over Google IMHO.
That's about all I have time for now but stay tuned, I have a feeling I'll stumble across some other fundamental comparisons for the two engines.
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 05:53 PM
Permanent Link: MSN Beta Search Notes
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