MSN Search Launches

I am proud and excited to announce that MSN Search is now officially launched.

With this final push we have made more than 40,000 Encarta encyclopedia articles and associated media available for free to MSN Search users, which translates to more than 1.5 million Instant Answers. We also improved and integrated Newsbot, added a button for RSS feeds on the bottom of all applicable search results pages, and increased our MSN Music selection.

We have been doing a ton behind the scenes over the last few weeks as well, tuning performance and working on scaling the system to handle MSN’s volume.

In conjunction with all this, MSN has launched a redesigned MSN.com homepage.  The page is streamlined, over 50% faster and showcases the new search functionality.  This will give users a great place to start their search experience.  Furthermore we’ve added the ability to access MSN Search from the Microsoft.com homepage.
What is most exciting to me is we now have a search platform in place that we can innovate on top of at a rapid pace. Thanks to all of you who provided feedback during the beta and tech previews ­ Keep it coming. The next year is going to be extremely exciting.
 

Thanks

Christopher Payne
Corporate VP, MSN Search