anyone know why the search results returned from msn for a manual search is different from a programmatic search? scenario: 1. i manually go to search.msn.com and key in "hello" and perform a search 2. i use php to call the file_get_contents function with "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=hello" as the parameter the result set returned is almost always different in terms of ranking of the individual sites listed - i.e. site 1 may rank no. 1 in the manual search but rank 100 in the programmatic search.
I just made a test with query "hello" in the MSN: 1. With my browser (http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=hello&mkt=en-us&FORM=LVSP) 2. With PHP using MSN search API 3. With PHP using file_get_contents echo (file_get_contents('http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=hello')); PHP: And I didn't see any differences in the results.
hmm... weird. i am sure i'm seeing very different ranking results for both the manual/human and the programmed file_get_contents function results. can anyone shed some light on this? thanks for your time.
There is a trend towards geotargetting search results so if you are in one country and your server is in a different country there may be slight difference. I'm not sure if it is enough to account for major changes though.
hmm... i suspect this is correct... can a couple people help test out this tool i developed? http://www.sescrub.com/msn_pos.php some people tell me that the results are accurate while some say the results are out by a couple of pages. i suspect it's due to geo-targeting...
I've tried it for a couple of keyword combinations for my blog and the results are accurate. I'm based in the UK. The keyphrases I used are fairly obscure so geotargetting might not have much of an effect.
hey thanks! i beginnning to think now that maybe it's not geo-targeting - more of which datacenter the user is using? anyone know if msn's physical architecture is anything like google's - i.e. many datacenters that may not be 100% in sync...