MSN Launches a Beta Version of the New MSN Search

Yesterday Google about doubled its index to eight billion pages. And I figured it was for competitive purposes but didn't really know why. When MSN announced a new search enigne, with an index of over five billion pages, things suddenly became much clearer. MSN's new search engine's available at http://beta.search.msn.com .

The search engine is an interesting mix. There's the five-billion-document index, as I mentioned. MSN claims in their press release is updated "weekly or even daily". The site also includes information from Microsoft Encarta to provide answers to direct reference questions. There's also search shortcuts, though Microsoft calls them "direct actions" for music information. There's also searches for Web, News, and Images.

Let's get right to the searching. I suspect the site is getting some serious traffic; I had to wait a few minutes for it to load. Then I had to load it again; it looks seriously messed up in Opera but fine in Mozilla. There's a search box with tabs for News and Image searching.

I started out with a simple search for white gardenias, not as a phrase. I got 35,850 results, as opposed to 35,400 for Google (huh? Three billion more documents in their index and they get less results?) and 31,600 for Yahoo. Sponsored results are at the top and bottom of the search pages; the sponsored results have a pale green background.

I was not very impressed with the relevance of the results. The first result was what looked like an e-commerce site, but the other results were more generic, sites that happened to mention white gardenias. Google's first result was a story about a mysterious white gardenia. (Actually the first two results on Google were the same story in different places.) Yahoo's first result was for a white gardenia print, while their third result was the same as MSN's first result.

After running the search I decided I wanted to play with MSN's "Search Builder" feature. The popup (popdown? It kind of slides down from the main menu when you click on it) contains several options that look like advanced search options, but also a series of three sliding toolbars (which should make Gary Price very happy) which allow you to specify the importance of approximate vs. exact results, popularity of search results, and how recently the returned pages were updated.

I adjusted the sliding bars so that all these features were more important and reran the search. Strangely the exact vs. less exact didn't seem to impact the search that much (I guess my search wasn't complicated enough?) but the other two factors did change the search a lot. Unfortunately even after the change I wasn't all that impressed with relevance.

MSN also has a button called Near Me, which provides search results based on your location (which I guess they're getting from my IP address.) This was nice, pointing me toward fairly relevant results, both in location and topic. (If you are browsing from somewhere that wouldn't give an accurate reflection of your preferred location, you can set your location in MSN's preference pages, along with filtering, number of search results per page, etc.)

I went to the advanced search to see what else was available. MSN doesn't have an advanced search page per se (ick) but that popdown menu allows you to specify certain special searches:

site search -- root or domain-specific; syntax is site:

link -- syntax link:, can be used with other syntax

area -- search by region or country code: syntax loc:

language -- search for one of several different specific languages, syntax language:

The slider adjustments also appear in the search box, but it's a little easier to just go ahead and use the sliders at first, and then change the numbers in the boxes that appear in the search box.

The search results for MSN contain title, snippet, URL, and cache link. Caches are dated (good) but the ones I saw did not contain highlighted keywords (bad). MSN also has a search for news and images, which were both okay. Neither of them impressed me much one way or the other.

After goofing around with gardenias, I decided to mess with Encarta. I asked MSN "Who Was Alexander Hamilton?" and "Who shot Alexander Hamilton?" and didn't get an answer for neither one. "Why is the sky blue?" didn't work either, so don't consider this a natural language search engine substitute. "Who was Abraham Lincoln?" didn't work either. CRIPES. "When was Abraham Lincoln born?" worked fine, with a pointer to more Encarta information. So if you want to search Encarta content, make it real basic reference questions, which may point you to larger information articles.

I also decided to play with the music content. I searched for Mississippi Mass Choir. No joy. I searched for Laurie Anderson. I got a pointer to information about Laurie Anderson and information on some of her albums. (I should also note that both these searches gave the artist's official site result as the first result, so no relevancy issues there.) Professor Longhair, however, did not point me to artist information, nor did a search for Kitaro. Their music information gets an I for Incomplete.

For the most part, I like the engine. I like the integration of the Encarta results. I'm sure we'll see more of that kind of content integration over time. I like the dated caches, and I like the speed of the results. I like the fact that you can use the link: syntax with other queries. I love the Near Me feature.

I am less enamored of the limitations of how Encarta responds to a query. I was sorry that there were some musicians that the MSN search missed. Some of the search rankings were a bit odd. It seemed like MSN was going in a similar groove to the other two search engines, and the more unusual feature it offered (the sliders) it buried as the last tab in a advanced search menu. I'd like the advanced search to be on its own page. I don't know how MSN handles multiple word queries but you DO get over four million results for one two three four five six seven eight nine ten, but NONE for one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven. Does it just break on queries that are too long? That's not good.

MSN's put together a pretty good engine, but they missed several opportunities here. RSS search results. More overt date-based searching. Built-in thumbnail previews. It's worth a look, but nothing knocked my socks off.

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