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...
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Now that we have a beta, people are starting to pay attention to whether their sites are in our index.  The two most common questions we get are (1) why did you not crawl my site, and (2) you crawled page X, but its not  in your index why?  Let’s take these one at a time. Why did MSNBot not crawl my site?  The answer to this is not straightforward so I will mention a couple of things that are worth  considering. The...
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Taking a cue from IE team blog and from Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto, allow me to lay out some basic principles and aspirations for the MSN Search blog:  Honest and Respectful.  We will tell the truth and stay the high road.  ‘nuff said. Useful.  We will announce new products, features and releases related to MSN Search.  We will answer frequently asked questions, make clarifications, and once in...
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As you may have heard, some screenshots from an internal pre-release build of MSN’s desktop search product were recently posted on the Neowin site.  While we’re flattered by the attention and interest, this was an unauthorized disclosure.  As many of you know, we have been working on a PC search product for some time, and have demonstrated some early prototypes over the past several months.  We are still on track to...
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As mentioned in a previous post on this blog, we recently received our first few MSN Bombs.  One of these was the phrase “more evil than satan”, which brought up both Google and Microsoft in the top 10 results.  A number of you sent us feedback on this.Well, we just pushed out our latest round of automated relevance improvements and they changed the results. Now neither Google nor Microsoft rank in the top 10 any more for...
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As you can imagine it’s been busy here. In the 2 days, we’ve served millions of page views and queries, rolled out a couple of system updates (note the improved performance) and yet I was still able to go see The Incredibles last night (it was great!). We’ve had over 1000 pieces of feedback sent to us, in addition to what we’ve seen in WebmasterWorld, the Search Engine Watch Forums, our newsgroup, and on blogs. The top...
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Several people have asked how the system performs a “Near Me” search for food bank near Seattle, WA so I thought it would be a good idea to explain how this is done here on the blog. As web pages are rolled into the index, the code looks for strings of text that are location references.  In particular, text that is formatted as an address is given a high degree of confidence.  When an address is found, tokens are added...
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As you would imagine, the launch of a new MSN Search Beta brought lots of conspiracy theories out into the open, and between the alleged flights of black helicopters, I thought I would give you guys some of the facts. We have the first set of reported MSN Bombs on our Beta. If you search for ‘more evil than satan’  the first result is Google. If you type in ‘evil corporation‘ (thanks, Jeremy) the first result is...
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In the process of making our new MSN Search beta broadly available we experienced some technical difficulties that caused the beta service to function improperly or be unavailable for some users for periods of time. We’re working through these issues one by one and you should see service availability and quality improve soon if not already.  We apologize for any inconvenience.  We expected to find some problems in the beta, and we...
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On behalf of the MSN Search team I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve begun the worldwide rollout of our new algorithmic search service Beta release.  I invite you to check it out at http://beta.search.msn.com and send us feedback via the “help us improve” links.  You can identify the Beta version by the text “Search (beta)” next to the MSN butterfly logo. This is an update of the service we started...
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