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Next: Newsfeeds Microsoft Network (MSN) SearchMSN Search results are currently based on the Yahoo! Inktomi index. However Microsoft has declared its intention to compete seriously with both Google and Yahoo! in the area of search. If past battles with Digital Research, Lotus, WordPerfect and Netscape are anything to go by things are going to get very rough and nasty. Microsoft has been caught napping over the rise of content targetted advertising which has done much to revitalise the dot.com sector over the last couple of years and is now worth more than cinema advertising. Microsoft's first line of attack is a near dominance in browser technology with Internet Explorer although alternatives such as Opera, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari are making inroads into this market by offering more advanced features such as tabbed browsing and improved security. Currently if a user mistypes a website name Internet Explorer redirects them to the MSN Search engine and this feature must account for a lot of MSN traffic. With control over 90% of user desktops there is no technical reason why Microsoft can't make life very difficult for Google and Yahoo! although a series of lawsuits, albeit with largely toothless judgements, may have cooled Microsoft's preference for dirty tricks. Instead Microsoft has thrown down the gauntlet by saying that its new search engine will return better results than Google. It also intends to integrate search into the computer desktop with a user seeing no difference between searching his computer and searching other resources such as the Web. The new Microsoft search engine that will be the backbone of this technology is currently in Beta. The interface is clean, almost Googlesque and the results also have a Google feel to them, at least in terms of appearance. The relevance of results is currently not perfect and the separation between 'sponsored' and real results not clear. Early users noticed a preference for pages created with Microsoft technology. In theory the search and software arms of Microsoft are separate so this may simply reflect the initial algorithms that were probably tested on Microsoft technology. Still it would be an interesting way to extend the Microsoft hegemony. Despite being described as an algorithmic search engine the results still seem to be influenced by on-page factors and prone to black-hat techniques. It is unfair to criticize a Beta even though Microsoft have made a lot of noise about this engine. As everyone knows Microsoft rarely get it right with the initial versions of their products but with deep pockets they are probably in this for the long haul. Microsoft were wrong-footed by the release of Google's desktop search in October 2004. Microsoft had originally announced that this feature would be incorporated into its Longhorn release of Windows sometime in 2006 with a browser based version being made available sometime beforehand. Apple will incorporate similar features in their next release of the Macintosh operating system - codenamed Tiger. Microsoft now say their desktop search tool will be released in a browser based version before the end of 2004. In July Microsoft acquired Lookout Software which has developed a program for searching Outlook eMail messages. Yahoo! say they have similar plans for desktop search. The new Microsoft search claims to have around 5 billion pages indexed. They run a blog at: which gives some interesting tidbits about the ongoing development of this engine. Their is a URL for submitting webites: Althought the search engine spider is very active and has no trouble picking up sites provided there is an inbound-link from a site already in the index. Optimizing for MSN SearchWith the old MSN search optimizing for Yahoo! meant optimizing for MSN Search as they shared the same Inktomi index. Microsoft doesn't want to give too much away about their algorithmic search engine. Microsoft has recently been very active on the patent front and there is almost certainly some technology equivalent to Google's Hilltop algorithm that forms the basis of results. According to their blog they also automatically filter pages for search engine spam:
Of course, detecting the difference between say, white on white text with a black background, which will be visible to an end use and true black-hat techniques is difficult and it may be that the MSN search filters are fairly wide in scope. It is probably wise to avoid techniques that could be mistaken for be spam. MSN Search give some general tips for optimizing for their engine. The advice has a few red herrings. They list the following items in order of importance
and they list the following as being search engine unfriendly due to the difficulty search engine robots have with this type of content
MSN Search supports the Meta Description tag format for adding descriptive text in SERPS but this is not used as part of the site ranking algorithm. If this tag is not present descriptive text is extracted from the page.
See AlsoMSN Algorithmic Search: http://beta.search.msn.com/
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