MSN Rolls Out a New Search Barrel

Microsoft has today announced a range of new services for its MSN Search service, and a new home page that looks a lot like another search engine that starts with G and ends with e. It's available at http://search.msn.com . The search engine, according to the press release, contains about a billion documents.

... well, it is a bit different. Instead of tabs MSN search uses a pulldown menu for you to specify what property you want to search (Web, news, dictionary, Encarta Encylopedia, stock quotes, movies, or shopping.)

I did a search for "Fred." I got sponsored results at the top and to the right. The sponsored results were carefully separated in a green box while the text box ads were over on the right. Listing information for each result includes title, URL, and summary only -- no page size, no cache, no nothin'. And the preferences say you can only get 50 results a page. Blah. (There is a total result return limit of 1000, like Google.)

On to the advanced stuff. Here's the syntax I can figure out so far:

title: -- search in title -- example: title:fred

link: -- find pages that link to page -- example: link:http://www.news.com

( You CAN MIX the link: syntax with other syntaxes in the new MSN search, which you still can't do in Google. For example link:http://www.news.com title:internet is a valid search.)

site: -- limit searches in a domain or upper-level domain -- example: fred site:edu

There are some other goodies available in the advanced search. You can specify that stemming is turned on and off; note that this is basic stemming that searches for movies when you enter movie. MSN does not appear according to my experiments to support deliberate stemming like moonli* when you want to find moonlit, moonlight, moonlighting, moonlizards, etc.

You can narrow your search results by country or language, as well as document depth, like AlltheWeb used to offer. You can also specify that the files returned be of a certain type (PDF, PPT, etc.) and that they contain links to certain types of content (images, MP3, Video, JavaScript, etc.)

You can use the advanced search in conjunction with the special syntax. For example, I can go to the advanced search and specify:

"European economy" link:http://www.cnn.com site:edu

and check that I only want results that contain links to images and MP3 files.

With a quick review I gotta say I like what I see. There are some things I definitely DON'T like -- the lack of information for each site result, only 50 results per page, etc. -- and there are some things I DO like -- the mixable link: syntax, the directory depth control, the specification for content on each page.

This is Microsoft's first shot across Google's bow, and it's solid though there's nothing revolutionary that I can see. July 4 is a holiday, and Google is famous for unveiling things on holidays. Are we going to see a shot back this weekend?

Posted in the following categories: Search Engines-MSN | TrackBack