MSN Search Facelifts And MSN Search Technology Preview

A year ago Microsoft announced their plans to develop search algorithms to build their own search engine and take Google head-on. I've been anxiously waiting to see something. Anything. Well, today is the day!

Two things happened today: MSN Search got a new look and Microsoft made available their new MSN Search technology preview. Before we proceed I'd like to clear up one misconception. According to Danny Sullivan,

Despite these cosmetic changes, under the hood, MSN Search itself still beats with a Yahoo heart. Perhaps half a heart is a better description. MSN Search continues to show a significant difference in the number of results found in comparison to the same queries at Yahoo.

Is MSN hitting less than the full Yahoo database? The company wouldn't comment about this. But in all likelihood, this is what's happening.

In other words, the technology preview search engine feeds from its own database, while the current MSN Search is Yahoo (or whatever it is).

Back to MSN Search. The page is clean, sparkling clean. I couldn't resist looking at their HTML. Yikes! Mike Davidson took a good swing at it in his blog on the subject of code sloppiness. What I don't get is why not design a clean page? It's only a couple of kilobytes of code. Just like in the old page, they use JavaScript to build out parts of the page. I also had lots of fun refreshing the page and observing how the date changed between June 30 and July 1. :)

As one reader in Mike's comment thread pointed out (see comment #16 by Hans) MSN Search is not yet engraved in people's minds as a search engine front door. For example, Google is www.google.com. MSN is www.msn.com. Oops, what's this pile of junk? "Wonder what dinosaur breath smelled like? Kobe to sign with the Clippers? Are protein & cell phones threats to fertility? Get a lawn analysis." What the f*** is this? 50,795 bytes of HTML alone delivered uncompressed?? How many people know to type in search.msn.com? I sure hope some day the "portal" junk pile is ditched in favor of the clean MSN Search page.

As to the technology preview... We'll see. I'm optimistic in its regard. I believe Microsoft is capable of beating Google and Yahoo at their own game! Some fun times are ahead.