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!
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.
This was posted at the MSN blog on the 8th Full Story We're probably seeing the effect of them "turning up the dial".
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.
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
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.
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.