MSN release their new search engine

As we reported last year, Microsoft has been developing its own search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo and this has been launched during January on MSN. The new look search engine and revised results listings have been available in a ‘beta’ format for several months and we reviewed this back in December’s issue of the newsletter. Now that is has been introduced into the main MSN Search tool we have started to notice some substantial changes to the search engine results being shown, although it is still too early to detect any real trends and the importance of the ranking criteria being used.

The search engine does seem to be effective at indexing the majority of pages within a website, which is good news for large, dynamic websites which will be able to use their pages to target a wide range of search phrases. It also hints that ‘paid inclusion’ (where websites pay a search engine to index all of their pages) is dying out, with only Yahoo still offering this service, and it is possible to submit sites to the new MSN search engine.

The launch of this tool now means that MSN is no longer using the same search results as Yahoo and therefore there are 3 major players in the search engine market, each with their own search engine. Yahoo and MSN could start to make some in-roads into Google’s dominance now, by improving their usability and results and through heavy marketing of these services through their portal services. Soon this could mean that any major changes to one of these engines should not have such a dramatic impact on a website’s search engine traffic in the way that changes to Google over the last few years have done and it will also become less important to heavily target just one search engine.

If you’re a current client, we’ll be reporting on the impact of the new MSN search engine on your ranking results over the next few months and making recommendations of action that may be required to improve your rankings on this search tool.

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