MSN Beta Junk

Thank God that didn't happen!!!

 

Alot of the searches I did were not based on my website - I could quite easily moan and groan because my site doesn't feature well in MSN, but it was a general search about different topics.

Some of the searches DID have irrelevant results, a lot of spam and a lot of duplicated pages, and sites with very little content. I agree though that MSN has supposedly thrown a lot of money into this and to be honest it looks like a complete rush effort in my opinion.

MSN are going to have to a lot more than play with it's interface if they want me to use them instead of Google.

 

The results from the research I did show MSN lagging behind, but not considerably. I think the results are just about appropriate for a Beta version of a search engine.

http://www.socengine.com/seo/guide/msn-beta-vs-yahoo-google.html

Interestingly enough, in my study, MSN's overall quality of sites listed slightly edged out Yahoo! - http://www.socengine.com/seo/guide/msn-beta-vs-yahoo-google.html#interestingnumbers

 

Maybe its my lack of knowledge, but everything I have searched for in MSN seems very relevant and has better content than most Yahoo or google sites I have seen come up for those same type searches. Looking at it from a consumers point of view and not a website owner.

 

I bet you'll find that there are significant difference in what people are searching for that divide the "I like it" and the "yawn... not yet" camps.

I'm generally searching for medical-psychiatric-health-research info, or SEO/search engine/tech news -- almost never products and services -- and I find Google much superior. When I've had these debates in the past about Yahoo vs. Google, it has seemed to divide along those lines.

 

I do agree with you that research material is better on google. For consumer related products though I have found MSN to be better than google and more relevant to date.

I think MSN may have learned something from google and is using the information they have aquired to use and test in their beta. I believe this will help them produce a better search engine than google and hence knock google off the top. I also believe the reason Yahoo hasnt done it is they dont have the R & D funds that google or MSN have. MSN IMHO has a lot more funds to put into R & D than google does and while google has to consentrate on their investors right now, MSN is not a the groud floor with theirs and have more lead way.

 

It looks like good things don't last. The ranking of my sites for various keywords are all dropping slowly..