Bing - Beta Ramp-Up - Search Blog

January 08, 2005, 01:11 PM by Bing | 49 Comments

As you know we have been testing the beta of our new search service on an opt-in basis for several months now. From time to time we also route some of the customers from our live search service at search.msn.com through the Beta web site in order to do scalability testing. Next week we intend to begin turning up the dial and direct more of our users to the Beta. You’ll continue to see us doing this on occasion for the forseeable future. As before, the service remains in beta status and we will officially launch it when it’s ready.

Oshoma Momoh,

General Manager, MSN Search Program Management

P.S. We have been getting some great ideas from the wiki – bugs reports, cool extensions, feature requests – but we’d like to see more! Head there and tell us what you think.

Comments

Joshua Wood

Posted On January 08, 2005, 02:50 PM

How do you suggest your site for crawling by the MSN search engine. The only thing I've been able to find is for the Overture powered suggest a site. If you do a search the top 3 results are useless. Result #1 is to sign up for submitit. Result #2 does not provide any information. and Result #3 is a Broken Link. I think result #3 is especially funny since it's titled more useful every day.

Search Engine Submission, Registration & Optimization Service for your Web Site
... can your business succeed if your site isn't there? ... That's why we created Submit It! -- to give you the ... one easy to use system. Submit It! is a serious ...
www.submit-it.com

MSN Advertising
Advertise with us! Welcome to the MSN Search advertising page, where our goal is to get your information in front of the right users. What's New with Search?
advertising.msn.com/msnsites/SubmitSite.asp

MSN Search -- More Useful Everyday
... to make sure it is correct (capitalization and punctuation are important), and then click your browser's Refresh button. Go to MSN ...
search.msn.com/addurl.asp

A search using the same terms on Google. Submit my Site to Google returns the information for getting yoru site crawled by google as the number one listing.

A search on the beta search engine does return results on how to add your site to the Beta search engine, so it looks like things are improving.

XeroCool

Posted On January 08, 2005, 03:33 PM

Josh, http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2. Submit your site through that link to be crawled.

Sean John

Posted On January 09, 2005, 09:22 AM

I checked out some SEPRs on high competitive terms: Viagra, Levitra, Propecia, Cialis and the results are spammy. Can't this be fixed?

Sydney Johnston

Posted On January 11, 2005, 05:08 AM

It's delightful to have yet a third alternative in the search world (why should Google and Yahoo have all the fun?) Can we assume that this is the prelude to an MSN version of AdWords? If so, marketers will be dancing in the streets. However, I hope that MSN carefully studies the AdWords/Overture model before setting up your own service. Overture has definitely fallen to second place with all the really savvy marketers that I know. Too many stories abound of click fraud on Overture, who seems to have only its own interests at heart, and not those of its marketers, who are the source of its revenue, after all. Pretty short sighted policy!

Al Sergei

Posted On January 11, 2005, 08:01 AM

I spent literally days searching at GOOGLE for a script to create a targeted meta search engine, getting a lot of pages without relevant information, after scrolling hundred of pages I decided to try MSN BETA, I was impressed with the results, at the first page of results I found what I was looking for, I removed Google Toolbar from my daily use workstation and I installed MSN toolbar.
My perception is that MSB Beta is returning “clean” results.

Online Auction Association

Posted On January 11, 2005, 11:02 AM

I can't wait for you to turn up the heat! It is refreshing to see an engine that rewards what we all know is the right thing. Provide content and let the world know.

This is great stuff!

Learn about Electricity

Posted On January 11, 2005, 03:40 PM

I have tested MSN Search Beta extensively, and while the localization feature still needs work, I would not hold up its release because of that. Because of what seems to me to be the most aggressive and deep indexing program of any of the search engines, the content being returned is really fresh and relevant.

One other minor issue: For page titles that include HTML formating like a <br> within them, please include the entire text of title in the search results, not just the text before the <br> or other HTML formatting directives. It will make the search results more informative, and I am sure you already store the entire title string. Just strip out the HTML formatting and post the entire title text.

Mark

Mike Siegert

Posted On January 11, 2005, 10:38 PM

I hope it will become official soon, because this is great stuff! Google will suffer, i tell you.

Turnkey Online Success and SEO

Posted On January 11, 2005, 10:43 PM

I wonder if they are going to attack MS again, now that they are going to win also over this market.

Nektar

Posted On January 12, 2005, 07:33 AM

The website name for MSN Search needs to be shortened. Google, Yahoo, etc have short, simple and easy to remember urls. MSN Search has horrible URL http://search.msn.com/ without the www. Please make a new domain for your MSN Search called like www.msnsearch.com or something and advertise it! Or, just make the www.msn.com home page show the search page and include a More link at the bottom for showing all the rest.

Turnkey Websites

Posted On January 13, 2005, 09:55 AM

I think that they are going to give more visibility to the searching facilities, at msn.com rather than changing search.msn.com in something else...and at the end, one dot more or less wouldn't change that much and MS can't renunce to its brand for creating a new brand for its search engine, i think.

http://search-engines-web.com/

Posted On January 14, 2005, 03:11 PM

The Ranking/Relevancy SERPs of "Beta" MSN?

Although the SERPs are somewhat different between MSN and the Beta - generally, the relevancy does NOT seem
to be any different.

Six of One - Half-a-Dozen of the Other.

Perhaps, it is a better that fates do NOT rise and fall on Google and Inktomi - so in the end this third option sort-of levels the playing field.

orbl

Posted On January 15, 2005, 05:20 PM

You have a major problem.

Doing a search for kitchen remodeling, my listing comes up, but with the title from somebody else's page. Then when you click on it, it goes to their page and NOT the URL listed. Then the address bar continues to show my URL.

Here is the listing:

The Pacesetter Corporation- Free offers and tips for Kitchen ...
Free offers and tips for Kitchen Remodeling The Pacesetter Corporation Free offers and tips for home depot, deck design, home improvement, interior design, home decorating, kitchen, door, home design ...

www.home-remodeling.org/kitchen-remodeling Cached page

mike

Posted On January 16, 2005, 11:56 AM

when are you guys gonna put in some filters for spam? am I going to have to make a blog telling everyone exactly how to spam their site to a #1 listing in the new msn beta, before you guys actually fix the problems, i've submitted several bug reports. Cloaking and doorway pages are performing very well. I'm seeing very basic, old school blackhat seo (stuff that most people abandoned because it get's detected by google and yahoo) working. I see alot of these bogus pages with cut and pasted google results pages doing well and 100's of internal links to doorway pages obviously with targetted anchor text. if any of you microsoft guys don't get what people are doing to get themselved to number one, feel free to email me.

mcarullo at gmaildotcom

Arizona Web Designer

Posted On January 16, 2005, 10:49 PM

I haven't seen any problems thus far- I really like the simple design and usability. I hope more users move towards this search engine since I have found Google's results to be slipping in relevancy lately, and the new MSN seems to like my sites so far :)

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