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Notes on tech

Notes on technology, business, enterpreneurship, economy, markets along with interesting general tidbits.


MSN Search - first impressions

2/01/2005 06:52:00 PM, posted by anand

Yesterday evening, I read that Microsoft is going to take wraps off its MSN search service on Tuesday (02/01/2005). So, I decided to take a sneak peak at the features and check out the quality of search offered by the now-not-in-beta search engine.

The search is pretty fast, but not terribly relevant. I tried searching for 'apache' on both MSN search as well as on its number one competitor Google. MSN came back with 'Apache corporation', while Google returned back with the Apache foundation (apache.org) as its first match. When I tried to do a 'Near me' search, for some weird reason my location was set as 'Cleveland, Ohio', instead of 'Redmond, WA'. Even at work, one of my colleagues tried the Near Me search and his profile too was set to Cleveland, Ohio.

Then, I tried "MSN search launch" as a query in both MSN and Google search engines. MSN came up with links to 'MSN search launch rumors.. " while Google came up with a CNET link of a story about MSN's new search engine launch.

The most impressive thing about MSN's search service is their Search builder. It is one of the best of all the search engines out there. It lets you specify parameters like Site/Domain, Country/Region, Language and even a slider that lets you give relevance to the results by factors like 'Updated time', 'Popularity', 'Match'. MSN is also making available 1.5 million answers from Encarta as well as some premium articles.

I dont think that the MSN search is a serious threat to Google or Yahoo with the current set of features that it offeres. They need a lot of catching up to do.
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