Microsoft releases Beta MSN Search to counter Google

Microsoft releases Beta MSN Search to counter Google

As announced earlier, Microsoft today released the second beta of their upcoming Search Engine, which would replace the current version running on MSN website. Google’s domination in the search engine market has lead to Microsoft’s massive investment in this engine and we are slowly getting an idea what Microsoft has in store for us.

They claim to have indexed around 5 billion pages (Google just doubled their indexed pages numbers to 8,058,044,651 web pages). However, without good results and presentation, it can all be futile. The homepage is getting less and less cluttered with advanced options hidden in popup boxes. Its CSS based and looks impressive. We have three tabs for Web Search, Images, and News. The new addition is the ‘Near Me’ search, which acts similarly to Google, and Yahoo! Local Search. In the preferences user can specify the location (It accepted Indian cities. Chandigarh in my case) and use the Near Me button to get results relevant to their locality. Apparently, it would take some time and lot of effort from MSN guys before local searches work outside America considering no result came for me on trying out the ‘Near Me’ searches.

MSN has Encarta integrated in the searches. Searching for something like Doppler Effect gave me information from Microsoft Encarta and links to detailed information. This might give an edge to Microsoft considering Google and Yahoo! have to rely on external resources, which might not be as elaborate as Encarta.

Another interesting feature of the new beta is ‘Results Ranking’ feature, which appear in the form of sliders. User can drag them up and down to change search preferences for three factors:
1. how new the results should be
2. how important the result pages should be (based on incoming links)
3. how much emphasis should go on exactly matching the search keywords

So how much is it improved? Well, it is better than the earlier version. The results are surprisingly fresher by MSN Search’s standards with my own pages showing recently updated cache. Result pages are pretty fast. But it would take me some more time of using before I can decide on how it compares to Google.

However, I would have liked if it showed results with numbered listings.