MSN Beta now live?!

[a389951l]

I just tried msn.com and typed in the search. And it appears that beta is live now for me anyway. Anyone else seeing this?

Or are they testing it out here and there?

[linkgangster]

It seems that the launching date is near. I'm sure that its competitors are watching closely too. Expect a hell lots of update from them :)

[thebassman]

Still showing old results to me... I hope they go live soon, though... if things stay the way they are, I'm looking to do well.

[dcristo]

It is indeed :) Thanks for the heads up...

[RVB]

It's not live for me yet.
There's a link under the main search box to the beta version
"MSN Search is improved! Check it out."

[thebassman]

Where are you seeing the new engine on their site? Just www.msn.com ? I'm seeing different results between www.msn.com and http://beta.search.msn.com still... :(

[dcristo]

thebassman - im seeing the results on msn.com and ninemsn.com.au

[Michael]

I just tried msn.com and typed in the search. And it appears that beta is live now for me anyway. Anyone else seeing this?

Or are they testing it out here and there?Testing it out.

Oshoma Momoh said last Saturday "From time to time we also route some of the customers from our live search service at search.msn.com through the Beta web site in order to do scalability testing. Next week we intend to begin turning up the dial and direct more of our users to the Beta".

- Michael

[thebassman]

Yeah... I checked out various different "MSN's" and I'm seeing all the old ones... that's pretty sweet that they're starting to live in various places... must be regional, though. I wonder if that's why I'm getting a lot more hits from MSN lately.... ?

[dcristo]

thebassman - how did your traffic levels of the old MSN compare to Yahoo? (feel free to add your photography forum to my directory its a great resource)

[thebassman]

Yahoo's always been about double... what I got from MSN... but they're almost neck and neck now (and thanks, I'll add the site now) ;)

[dcristo]

Oh ok cool, I can definately do with some additional traffic from MSN...

[schlottke]

http://ninemsn.com.au/ is nothing close to the beta for me- Nor is it close to the regular MSN. If these are the new results, Ill be worried for them since a lot of the links didn't even work...

Many of the top results for some of my terms were PDF files on google, but with only a ww. infront of them, which resulted in a page not found.

Can't personally complain about our rankings though.

[dcristo]

I noted ninemsn.com.au because I have an australian domain.

[schlottke]

Are the results always so different from the .com's (excuse my ignorance on the subject, never paid much attention to .au)

[DangerMouse]

We've got beta results live in the UK this morning!

http://search.msn.co.uk

Sorry... seems like they're flipping it back and forth actully!

But they ARE serving ads on the beta results in the UK

[Elee]

It was off and on all day yesterday. Sort of like Yahoo is changing from old to new. Hope they both settle down soon.

[digitalpoint]

I'm seeing it live today (didn't yesterday).

[thebassman]

Man... I'm still not seeing it anyways... grrr....

[nfzgrld]

Not live for me yet either, but I hope it is soon. MSN has only 10 of my pages indexed, the beta has 92! I haven't been getting much traffic from MSN at all, but I'll bet it starts to increase as the beta goes online in more areas. At least I hope it does.

[chachi]

not seeing in here right now, although I have seen it at times over the past week

[GuyFromChicago]

I'm seeing beta results via the MSN portal page here too today. Have been for the last few hours.

[spdude]

I just noticed some referrals in the logs. MSN beta is live for me now.. went to msn.com and tried it there, same thing!

[thebassman]

Is it showing up any different in the logs, or just referrals from MSN? I'm still not seeing it.... grrr....

[ResaleBroker]

It's been going back and forth for me too!

[spdude]

Is it showing up any different in the logs, or just referrals from MSN? I'm still not seeing it.... grrr....

It's like a normal MSN referral... like search.msn.com/results...

Just noticed the phrase (actually the word) was never bringing hits before.. then clicked the link.. and I saw beta there. then I removed all the stuff in the URL.. and also searched it from msn.com's home page.. and saw they switched it entirely. Still has (beta) written in the corner though.

[GuyFromChicago]

This was posted at the MSN blog on the 8th

Next week we intend to begin turning up the dial and direct more of our users to the Beta. You’ll continue to see us doing this on occasion for the forseeable future. As before, the service remains in beta status and we will officially launch it when it’s ready.


Full Story (http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/08/349199.aspx)

We're probably seeing the effect of them "turning up the dial".

[nfzgrld]

At the moment it's live here too, (Los Angeles). It's definitly still in beta though. I did a link query and it came back telling me there were 655 links to my site! I was about to go have some been on that news, then I went through the pages and the abruptly ended at page 5. Turns out the real number is more like 46. That figures.

[mudnik]

It's live for me too in Singapore.

[expat]

It's gradualy like they switch x % of traffic thus turning up the wick.

For a keyword combo that is not listed in Y we see a gradual increase of ref's from MSN.

Expat

[uca]

Nothing new here in Boston.

Although I thought that maybe MSN would test it's new SE a little longer, maybe late spring/early summer.
And I would appreciate that as I am not doing very well on the Beta.

[nfzgrld]

I'm starting to have my doubts of the value of this. As I've gone through I'm finding my shopping site is showing up ranked very high on a lot of my keywords. In fact, for one of them it's #1! However, in the past 24 hours as the thing seems to have gone live all over the world, I have not gotten a single hit from msn. It makes me wonder who, if anyone, is using it! Of my top 7 keywords 5 of them are landing me in the first three serps. If it were Google I'd be getting a considerable amount of traffic from this.

[uca]

They're definetely still testing...