MSN Search Beta

Following up from this morning’s google entry, I forgot to mention the new MSN Search Beta. Released a couple of days ago, it’s Microsoft’s answer to google. So far, for a beta, if seems pretty decent. It’s got the majority of workingwith.me.uk in its index so far, and seems to have about 2.6 billion pages index in total (based on a search for “a”). This compares with about 8 billion pages in google (up from about 4 billion a week or so ago). Not bad at all for a new beta engine.

While I’ve not really had time yet to try out a load of search queries on the MSN beta search engine to see how “good” they are, I have noticed one interesting feature. If you click on the “+Search Builder” link on the main search page, and then on “Results Ranking”, you’re shown an area which has three different scrollbars. Moving these affects your search results, and boy does it affect them! I’m not sure how much use “normal” search users would have for these, but it’s a nice fun little addition to the front-end.

The MSN Search Blog Team are also running their own MSN Search Blog. I honestly can’t say that it’s that interesting at the moment, but if nothing else, it might prove interesting as time goes by.

permalink | 12 November 2004

about wwm

workingwith.me.uk is a resource for web developers created by Neil Crosby, a web developer who lives and works in London, England. More about the site.

Neil Crosby now blogs at The Code Train and also runs NeilCrosby.com, The Ten Word Review and Everything is Rubbish.