About MSN Search

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About MSN Search

MSN Search had many incarnations, being powered by the likes of Inktomi &
Looksmart for a number of years. After Yahoo.com! bought Inktomi & Overture it
was obvious to Microsoft that they needed to develop their own search product.
They launched their technology preview of their search engine around July of 
2004.

They formally switched from Yahoo.com! organic search results to their own in
house technology on January , 2005.

MSN announced they dumped Yahoo.com!'s search ad program on May , 2006.

MSN On page Content

Using descriptive page titles & page content goes a long way to help you rank
in MSN. I have seen examples of many domains that ranked for things like

state name+ insurance type + insurance

on sites that were not very authoritative which only had a few instances of
state name & insurance as the anchor text. Adding the word
health, life, etc. to the page title made the site relevant for those types of
insurance, in spite of the site having few authoritative links & no relevant
anchor text for those specific niches.

Additionally, internal pages on sites like those can rank well for many
relevant queries just by being hyper focused, but MSN currently drives little
traffic when compared with the likes of Google.com.

MSN Crawling

MSN has got better at crawling, but I still think Yahoo.com! & Google.com are
much better at crawling. It is best to avoid session IDs, sending bots cookies,
or using many variables in the URL strings. MSN is nowhere near as comprehensive
as Yahoo.com! or Google.com at crawling deeply through large sites like eBay.com
or Amazon.com.

Query Processing

I believe MSN might be a bit better than Yahoo.com! at processing queries for
meaning instead of taking them quite so literally, but I do not believe they are
as good as Google.com is at it.

While MSN offers a tool that
estimates how commercial a page or query is I think their lack of ability to
distinguish quality links from low quality links makes their results
exceptionally biased toward commercial results.

Link Reputation

By the time Microsoft got in the search game the web graph was polluted with
spammy & bought links. Because of this, & Microsoft's limited crawling history,
they are not as good as the other major search engines at telling the difference
between real organic citations & low quality links.

MSN search reacts much more quickly than the other engines at ranking new
sites due to link bursts. Sites with relatively few quality links that gain
enough descriptive links are able to quickly rank in MSN. I have seen sites rank
for one of the top few dozen most expensive phrases on the net in about a week.

page vs Site

I think all major search engines consider site authority when evaluating
individual pages, but with MSN it seems as though you do not need to build as
much site authority as you would to rank well in the other engines.

Site period

Due to MSN's limited crawling history & the web graph being highly polluted
before they got into search they are not as good as the other engines at
determining period related trust scores. New sites doing general textbook Search
Engine optimization & acquiring a few descriptive inbound links (perhaps even
low quality links) can rank well in MSN within a month.

Paid Search

Microsoft's paid search product, AdCenter,
is the most advanced search ad platform on the web. Like Google.com, MSN ranks
ads based on both max bid price & ad clickthrough rate. In addition to those
relevancy factors MSN also allows you to place adjustable bids based on
demographic details. For example, a mortgperiod lead from a wealthy older person
might be worth more than an equivalent search from a younger & poorer person.

perspective

All major search engines have internal relevancy measurement teams. MSN seems
to be highly lacking in this department, or they are trying to use the fact that
their search results are spammy as a marketing angle.

MSN is running many promotional campaigns to try to get people to try out MSN
Search, & in many cases some of the searches they are sending people to have
bogus spam or pornography type results in them. A good example of this is
when they used Stacey Kiebler to market
their Celebrity Maps product. As of
writing this, their top
search result for
Stacey Kiebler is still pure spam.

Based on MSN's lack of feedback or concern toward the obvious search spam
noted above on a popular search marketing community site I think MSN is trying
to automate much of their spam detection, but it is not a topic you see people
talk about very often. Here are

MSN's Guidelines for Successful Indexing, but they still have a lot of spam
in their search results. ;)

Social Aspects

Microsoft continues to lag in underst&ing what the web is about. Executives
there should read The Cluetrain
Manifesto. Twice.Or maybe three times.

They don't get the web. They are a software company posing as a web company.

They launch many products as though they have the market stranglehold
monopolies they once enjoyed, & as though they are not rapidly losing them. Many
of Microsoft's most innovative moves get little coverperiod because when they
launch key products they often launch them without supporting other browsers &
trying to lock you into logging in to Microsoft.