Microsoft launches new beta search engine

As expected, Microsoft launched the beta version of its new search engine in November. The look of the site is very simple, following the Google model, and the results that it lists so far are quite fragmented, indicating that it has not crawled a great deal of pages yet and the majority of results appear to be US based websites.

However, when it comes out of beta and replaces the current MSN search (which is powered by Yahoo) it will mean that there will be 3 major players in the search market (MSN, Yahoo and Google), all using their own proprietary technologies. This will add some competition back into the market, although its performance will need to be exceptional to displace the hold that Google now has in the search field.

Perhaps the most interesting feature on MSN’s new tool is the Search Builder menu that provides a series of options, including ‘results ranking’ which allows users to customise their searches using sliding scales to focus on relevance, popularity or how frequently a site is updated. There is also a local search filter (Near Me) although this currently only works for US locations and is based on ISP address.

A good source of information about the new search engine is the official MSN search ‘blog’.

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