MSN Experiments with a Newsbot

First Google News, now?...MSN is testing an experimental service in the UK. It's in beta, but you can try out MSN Newsbot for yourself at http://uk.newsbot.msn.com/ .

Cosmetically it's not too different from Google News. On the front you'll see headlines in several different categories, including UK, Sports, Business, Entertainment, and Tech. On the left menu you'll see links to other Newsbots -- France, Spain, and Italy, along with category listings of news. There's also a link to the most popular articles.

A search for "Alonzo Mourning" found 153 results. Results contain the date, the URL, and a sentence from the article. There doesn't appear to give precise date information (like "indexed ten minutes ago") and there doesn't appear to be any way to sort stories except how they're sorted. I could not find any working special syntaxes and I couldn't find any way to show more than 20 results per page.

I know this is a beta, but between the limited number of search results (and for those of you complaining that Alonzo Mourning is too American- centric, do a comparison for ("Tony Blair" Chirac) between the two engines and check the results count) and the lack of syntaxes (that I can find, anyway -- if anybody has a clue pass it on) I'm going to give this a miss until it's a little more evolved.

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