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New MSN search engine: How good is it?
By Nowshade Kabir
If you have an online business or you just use Internet as one
of your marketing tools, you know that how important are the search
engines in your quest to get more targeted visitors to your website.
The changes in search engine field can have unexpected outcome for
your online endeavors. That’s why it is important to be well-informed
on impending progress in this sphere. Microsoft has recently come
out with the latest beta version of its much touted search engine.
Supported by 5 billion indexed pages, it is poised to become one
of the most powerful search engines in the market.
Right now MSN is using Yahoo provided search results for queries
done through its search page, which it’s planning to change
somewhere in early next year with its own. You can check out the
search engine at http://beta.search.msn.com
. Google’s immense success and profitable business model enticed
Microsoft and others to look into lucrative search engine market
seriously. Amazon, for example, has recently launched its web search
site A9.com.
Today, Google carries out almost 50 percent of all searches on
the Internet. Yahoo with 24 percent of the market share is trailing
in a distant second place. MSN with 14 percent lags far behind from
the competitors – a situation, which won’t be very easy
to change. However, Microsoft has a long history of copying booming
products; make their replicas some times, arguably, better then
the originals, and clinch larger portion of the market shares.
Microsoft has successfully done this to Borland’s dominance
of programming languages in the early days. The list of victims
continued with once utterly popular word processor –WordPerfect,
market dominant spreadsheet – Lotus 1-2-3, Novell’s Netware
and finally Netscape. Since 90 percents of all personal computers
run on Windows, Microsoft gets an extra edge against its competitors,
which it’s capable of exploiting very effectively.
What is new in MSN search?
This version of MSN search incorporated several interesting features,
which other search engines are lacking at this moment. Direct answers
to plain language factual searches Unlike Google or Yahoo, Askjeeves
has better ability to find answers to direct plain language searches.
MSN search has taken this one step further by adding Microsoft's
Encarta reference tools to its features. Ask, what is the capital
of Russia? You will get the right answer at the beginning of the
result page. Questions like “What is the size of a Blue whale?”
also brings in exact answer. No doubt, students will love this feature
as it makes a lot easier for them to get specific answers to the
questions related to facts and figures.
Near me Microsoft's new search engine includes a ''near me'' button
that helps users find websites for a given location. In this release,
this works only in United States. Once you press this button MSN
search figures out where are you located using your computer’s
IP address. However, this can be easily superseded by changing setting
preferences. This is important if you are located in New York and
looking for something near Boston. Search Builder In other search
engines, if you would like to customize your search you have to
use advance search options from a separate page.
MSN search has made it a lot easier for average users by adding
the ability of customization right on the search box. Once you click
on the Search Builder from the link right underneath of the search
box a drop down menu will open. Initially, the menu might look a
little confusing; with little patience you will be able to use available
great features easily. The tool “search terms” allows
you to add Boolean search options. Site/ Domain tool is used for
limiting a search to specific site or domain, or excluding them
from your query.
“Links to” tool helps you make your query within the
sites linked to a specific site. Country/ region and language options
are required to make geography or language specific searches. The
best option from this group of features is the “Result Ranking”.
This option allows you to refine searches and give you a better
control over the search result by using a set of three bars. By
sliding the bars up and down you choose whether you want to see
more of exact match or approximate match, more popular or less popular,
static or dynamic pages as search results.
You can generate an impressive range of results for a single query
thanks to this option. This could be very useful for some types
of searches. For example: if you are looking for news based pages,
you might prefer to choose more dynamic pages rather than static
ones. Preference setting Most notable options on the setting page
are “Safe Search” – ability to filter out sexually
explicit images and texts, and ability to fix the number of results
displayed from one particular site. Relevancy Many reviewers claim
that if you compare the search results with Google, MSN search engine
“falls short” in relevancy. However, my results showed
otherwise.
I ran a search on the phrase “trade leads”. The results
from both the search engines were very relevant. The only difference
in MSN I noticed is our http://trade-leads.rusbiz.com managed to
turn up on the first page. But, a search on the word “e-catalog”
was brought better – more relevant – results on MSN then
Google. This time too I was happy to see http://e-catalog.rusbiz.com
on the first page of MSN search results.
Conclusion : If you consider all the new features of MSN
that Google does not have yet, its ability to cover natural language
queries, quality level and relevance of results, ability to refine
searches, there is no doubt that MSN search engine is as good as
Google.
About the author Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer
and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology,
he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade
and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions
to start and run online business.
You can contact him at mailto:nowshade@rusbiz.com
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