MSN Search Tech Preview - Around the Horn

Finally! It is about time that the Tech Preview site was made available. It might be possible that this preview will last about as long as the Search Champs meeting is being held -- just a prediction.

SEbasic's blog notices that the site is sluggish. The little rainbow icons for feedback are now gone.

SEbasic also notices the same thing I did, the preview sometimes will only show you seven or eight results out of millions -- as if the result set is being "throttled back". They will not allow you to view additional pages via the next>> button (it is not there). The result set is not even a full page of ten items either. This appears to not happen all the time, just some of the time.

They are showing how many results they have for the individual queries. This was not there before. What is weird however, is that if you advance to the 3rd or 4th page of the result set -- the totals will change. I kept an eye on this, and saw the number change many times.

SEbasic likes the results for his pet searches. I have to agree, so do I. After all I am number one for Web Development News out of 16 million plus. The BoG Forums are in the top ten for some key "xxxxx forum" key terms.

I can only attribute these successes at MSN Search to strong anchor text and page titles. All of the terms were targeted and the onpage factors were there to support them as well. Basic SEO skills work at MSN Search.

Results this time around seemed less spammy and multiple pages for a site were consolidated into one, sometimes a site would have the indented supplementary result with it. They managed to work this out pretty well. All in all -- the results were pretty darn good with the checking I did.

InsideGoogle is a little disgruntled that his blog is not even in the MSN Search Index. I would be too. MSNbot has been busy as a bee, and it misses his site entirely? Something wrong there.

Nathan notices, as did I, that there is Message Board set up for the Search Tech Preview. I visited the board, not much shaking, just an announcement that the Tech Preview site was open again. Like duh!

He also says, the interface is very simplistic. The large font turns him off and he would want a smaller, tighter interface. I summize that he is using Internet Explorer, because I remember the fonts being rather large and they must not have changed in that regard. I was using Firefox PR1 to view the site with and found the font actually very tiny and had to increase the font size to actually read the green URL text. I would assume that this is just a temporary interface though, and they will be sticking with their new layout that they unveiled a couple of months ago.

I left a comment in his blog about the number of pages the sites were returning. I noticed that they were right on top of things, and the result counts (if you can trust them) were right in line with Google counts but running a little less. A hell of lot better than Yahoo! Search anyway -- time for them to get on the ball over there.

They are also digging up some stuff I have not come across yet. Found some references that you would never probably see in Google, such as .cgi comments from MovableType blogs and numerous pages with SID numbers in them (many forum references are showing SID's). The later is something they will probably have to work on in the future.

MSN uses the domain: command, although the site: command works too -- but domain: returns more results. It does not return all of the pages though. You have to use a word that is on most of your pages in order to get the results to show all of your pages. In the case of this site, I used domain:www.webstractions.com webstractions to reveal all of the pages. Bug? Or is this intentional?

Also, to repeat what Nacho said at SearchEngineWatch forums:

1. Keyword-in-domain continues being strong, but not as much as Round 1.
   
2. Cache is as fresh as your grocery store around the corner.
   
3. Improved navigation and nicer looks.
   
4. The index seems to have been growing nicely.
   
5. link:www.domain.com is working well too.
   
6. Big authority websites carry weight in ranking. Seems like mom & pop will continue to struggle.
   
7. On page factors and content weigh in heavily.
   
8. Results for other languages are not coming up well (I tried Spanish).

And my response:

1. This could be true. I think the answer is as previously noted about anchor text and titles.
   
2. Damn ... I knew I forgot to look at that! That wasn't there in the first preview.
   
3. My feeling is that this is a temporary shell. They will stick with the current MSN Search layout (or another one that we have not even seen).
   
4. Oh hell yes! It has grown very well. They are on a tear.
   
5. I found the link: showed less than domain:, plus you had to add a qualifying word to trick the query into revealing your pages.
   
6. I am not so sure about that. I can see a good mix here. In some cases, mom and pop or startup sites are doing quite well. But this could be subjective too. Everyone will have a different interpretation of that.
   
7. Umm ... I think it is anchor text and titles. But that is a debate, I hate to debate. Let's just say you are correct! ;-)
   
8. Tomaré su palabra en eso.