One week out and here's a roundup

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One week out and here's a roundup

11/19/2004 7:23 PM
  • Comments (9)

We launched the beta just over a week ago and there’s been a lot of discussion about what we’ve been doing.

Reviews of the beta:

WebProNews notes that the beta feedback has been mixed.
Mike Hall loves the fact that we can help him with his algebra homework.
Angsuman Chakraborty thinks that we released the Beta too early. He also questions the veracity of our site descriptions. I want to respond to this by re-iterating that there is no human intervention in our Index; all results are based on our algorithms.
Cyan Bane is excited for desktop search and likes the results & the UI.
Stingo likes the UI but thinks that our relevance needs work.

Extending the beta:

The first extensions of the beta! Internetreklama has bookmarklets for msn search on IE, Opera, Mozilla & Firefox. Thanks for making these.
SEO Scoop discusses why someone should consider adding MSN Search to their site.

About the blog (which has 249 public subscribers on bloglines, pretty good for 1 week old):

Nathan isn’t sure if the blog is trying too hard or not, but is glad that we are using it.
Mike Manuel has a play-by-play of our first set of posts.
Peter Dawson told us in the blog comments that we should jump on the cluetrain. We're trying!

Finally, a contingent of us made it to the Kirkland Google party last night. I was the mystery blogger that Scoble mentioned (I’m the guy on the right next to Stefan B. of Amazon). It was a great time. Thanks for the party Google & welcome to the neighborhood.

--Brady

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Comments
  • Geoffrey Gonzalez
    11/20/2004 12:48 AM
    Welcome MSN. Will you continue using overture / yahoo for pay per click? They have a difficult time with bilingual web sites. Geoffrey
  • Deep Ganatra
    11/20/2004 6:45 AM
    I think they have renewed the contract till June 2005 but i am not very sure about it...

    may be comment by MS will confirm it :)

    Deep
  • Deep Ganatra
    11/20/2004 6:47 AM
    check this
    http://news.com.com/Microsoft+extends+Overture+ad+contract/2100-1024_3-5458128.html

    It is extended for 1 year...i.e. till June 2006 (typed year wrongly in first post)

    Deep
  • Nathan Weinberg
    11/20/2004 8:57 PM
    Actually, I think you guys are doing a great job with the blog. It is far more impressive than any company blog out there. My comment was that you were trying to hard to be funny.
  • somebodyhadtosayit
    11/21/2004 9:13 PM
    Nice hair! :)
  • Brian Turner
    11/22/2004 7:43 AM
    Actually, I think the results in the MSN search beta are great - there is definitely a different spin on relevance compared to Yahoo! and Google, but the results remain relevant.

    What is interesting is how different each search engine's results are for any particular topic - each is clearly focussing on different criteria for their relevancy values, and each therefore each search engine is able to offer their own very valid set of suggestions for any specific search query.

    Personally, I hope that MSN don't change the current algo too much before public release - the fact that the results are relevant but different to the other SE's is a strength to build on. It empowers the internet community with a real choice in the market.

    Frankly, MSN Search Beta reminds myself of Google about 2 years ago, before they really started shifting their SERPs against potential spam, rather than focussing solely on user query relevancy by site.

  • eWhisper
    11/22/2004 8:44 AM
    It has been interesting talking to several people at MSN over the past week about their beta search and how they see their engine evolving.

    Overture just signed a new agreement with MSN through June of 2006, however, many are still waiting to see if MSN rolls out a PPC engine before making their search results as good as they can be.

    The sliders are very interesting, but still have quite the tweaking togo.

    Should be an interesting ride.

    Welcome to the game, MSN.
  • Chris Humber
    11/22/2004 12:54 PM
    Now that MSN search is gearing up for a full launch, will you all take a more active roll in Jupiter Media's Search Engine Strategies conference? Especially in their "meet the crawlers" session?
  • Angsuman Chakraborty
    12/1/2004 11:10 PM
    > I want to respond to this by re-iterating that there is no human intervention in our Index; all results are based on our algorithms.

    I am happy to know that.
    What bothers me is that certain sites seems to have rather strange description, something which is definitely not derived from its contents or meta tags. An example which I quoted there for Oracle -
    "Silicon Valley software giant supplies applications for enterprise information management. Features demos and upgrade downloads."

    It is however not so with many other sites. I can clearly see that it normally places a great emphasis on meta tags, specially the description tag to provide summary information.

    As you said it is based on algorithms. I don't disagree with that. However I wonder if the algorithms take as its input some text file (or other information source) which contains specific instructions & descriptions regarding some selected sites :)

    The reason for this assumption is because certain site descriptions are clearly not content based.

    Looking forward to your thoughts on this.
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