June 11, 2009

Hitwise Adds to Good News for Bing

We've already seen comScore and StatCounter report an auspicious start for Microsoft's newly launched Bing search engine. Now, Hitwise shares Initial Bing Stats for US and Canada.

According to Heather Dougherty, Hitwise's director of research:

In the US, Bing ranked 17th among all websites out of over 450,000 websites, up from 5120 the week before the official launch when the website was merely a placeholder. Within the Search Engines category, Bing ranked 4th out of the search engines tracked by Hitwise and Bing Image Search ranked 15th for the week ending June 6, 2009.

In Canada, Bing hit the top 10 among all websites during the first week of launch and captured 1% of all Canadian Internet visits last week. Bing also ranked 3rd last week in terms of the market share of visits within the Search Engines category behind Google Canada and Google.

That's quite a hot start, though it remains to be seen how long that traffic level can be sustained. It's driving awareness with its TV ad campaigns, media coverage, and curiosity, but those things won't keep Bing going at these levels for long. Microsoft needs to offer searchers something that exceeds what they can get from their current search engine -- most likely Google -- to make them change their behavior.

The surge in traffic is at least worth a short-term look from advertisers. Melissa Mackey took a look at Bing from an advertiser perspective today in "Can Bing Really Bring It for PPC Advertisers?" She says it's more than just rebranded Live Search, and Microsoft has promised more advertising innovations coming down the line soon.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

May 28, 2009

Microsoft Live Search is Now Bing

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today drew back the curtain on the new incarnation of Live Search: Bing.

Speaking at the D7 Conference in San Diego, Ballmer launched Microsoft's new Search brand, formerly code-named "Kumo." Bing will begin rolling out in the coming days and will be fully available on 6/3.

More than just a rebranding of Live Search, Microsoft is repositioning Bing as a "decision engine," with a goal "to provide customers with intelligent search tools to help them simplify tasks and make more informed decisions," according to a Microsoft spokesperson.

Bing's "decision engine" will begin by focusing on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

"Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find," Ballmer said in a statement. "When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they've found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions."

Bing includes some advancements to Live Search's core search, such as entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology. It also offers a new user experience model, which changes based on the query to offer more relevant decision-making tools.

The Bing brand will extend across other Microsoft search products. Microsoft's mapping platform, Virtual Earth, will now be branded as Bing Maps for Enterprise. Technology from Microsoft's April 2008 acquisition of Farecast is now a central part of Bing Travel. Microsoft's popular cashback program is now dubbed Bing cashback, and will be fully integrated into the Bing Shopping experience.

Microsoft has created a new site describing Bing, DiscoverBing.com, and the brand has a new Twitter account, @bing.

Earlier this week, AdAge reported that Microsoft will launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, which will include online, TV, print and radio.

According to AdAge: People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges.

The Bing situation is a lot like Ask.com's situation two years ago, and again last year. In 2007, Ask.com launched a $57 million campaign aimed at winning new searchers with quirky messaging, taking on Google and others head-on. In 2008, it spent another $22 million, but shifted gears to focus on certain niches it was already doing well in.

Those campaigns didn't help Ask.com win any market share. Will Microsoft's campaign for Bing fare any better?

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

May 27, 2009

Live.com Offers Instant Answers for NHL, NBA Playoff Games and Players

If your team wasn't painfully swept in the playoffs last night, you might want to use Live.com to keep up with future playoff games. Typing in the name of a team or player will give you Instant Answers, a feature that Live Search has increasingly been expanding.

Right now the NHL and NBA playoffs are going on. Last night the Pittsburgh Penguins won the Eastern Conference finals, beating my Carolina Hurricanes. The only thing that makes this ok is if they go on to beat the Detroit Red Wings for the Stanley Cup. BUT, Detroit's Western Conference playoffs are not over yet. They are up against the Chicago Blackhawks 3-1 and need just one more game to move on. Game 5 is tonight and if you're away from your TV, you can check scores via Live.com and get an instant update on what's going on.

Maybe you're not away from your TV, but you're watching the Denver-Los Angeles game in the NBA playoffs. That series is tied at 2 games each. Perhaps you're interested in learning the stats of a particular player. Simply type that player's name into Live.com and get Instant Answers stats.

This feature is a little trickier, however, since players don't have unique names. For example, the Denver Nuggets Chris Anderson shares a name with a name with the editor-in-chief at Wired Magazine. No Instant Answers stats come up for his name.

Another Denver Nugget, J.R. Smith, shares a name with a plumbing products company. His Instant Answers stats show up after the first organic link for that company.

For the majority of names, the Instant Answers stats works just fine. It's a great feature for sports junkies who want to look up stats on the fly.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 7:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 15, 2009

Cashback Gives Lift to MSN/Windows Live Shopping Search

When Microsoft launched its Cashback program last year, many in the search and tech community snickered. It seemed laughable that Microsoft had to pay people to search. A year later, the joke is on the doubters.

New data out from Nielsen shows a 615% growth in MSN/Windows Live Shopping Search in the past year. It should be pointed out, however, that shopping search engines account for a small percentage of the overall search market. However, Microsoft's goal of attacking search niche by niche might just be on the right track.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 16, 2009

Live Search Updates Cashback Shopping Site

Microsoft's Live Search team has updated their Cashback Shopping site. They've merged Live Search Products into the Cashback site to aid in the consumer purchase decision process.

The update includes:

Improved relevance and site performance via Jellyfish (acquired by Microsoft in October 2007) migration with Live Search
Reviews and Opinion Ranking now appear on the product pages.
Browse by feature and sort by ratings

Click here to visit the Cashback shopping site. Below are screenshots:

What do you think of the new site? Let us know in the comments section below.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 25, 2009

Live Search Offers NCAA Tourney Info in Instant Answers

Live Search has added NCAA basketball tournament information to the Instant Answers they offer in the search results. Use "NCAA tournament," "March Madness," or "college basketball" to get broad answers. Use a team name and mascot to get Instant Answers about, um, a TEAM!

Earlier this week, Live Search unveiled Active Answers and Instant Answers are included in the IE 8 search box as well. Last November, shopping and flight status information were added to Instant Answers.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 24, 2009

Live Search Unveils Active Answers

Live Search is adding a new feature to its search results. They call it Active Answers and it's designed to give users up-to-the-minute information on certain search queries.

The first Active Answers to be released is flight status info. Simply query the name of the airline and the flight number and you'll get the latest status on the flight.

Check it out:

As you can see, the data was provided by Farecast, a travel search site Microsoft acquired last year. Last November, Microsoft added flight information to Instant Answers, which is also provided in the main search results.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 2, 2009

Live Search to Get New Brand, Features

Major hat tip to LiveSide.net for gathering the bits and pieces coming out about Live Search's new brand and features. It seems a Microsoft exec leaked a Tweet (later taken down) about playing with a pre-beta version of the new Live Search. (Live Side got a screenshot of the Tweet before it was taken down.)

Karen Young at MVP tweeted that Steve Ballmer will discuss the Live Search update this Wednesday at the MVP Summit.

Perhaps then we'll know if tests that people have been noticing - from search history to an image pager to a new font - will be included in the beta version.

In the meantime, Live Side says the possible new name for the rebrand is Kumo.com which they say means cloud or spider in Japanese.Is Kumo a good enough word to use as a verb?

One of the reasons Google's brand is so strong is because people say that they Google things. Just the other week at the Academy Awards, Adrien Brody talked about what happens if you "Google Richard Jenkins."

Would you Kumo Richard Jenkins? Maybe. It all really depends on the search results, me thinks.

But what do YOU think? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 9, 2009

Live Search Adds Fourth Mainline Ad Position in the UK

Live Search has added a fourth mainline position for its search ads in the UK. The move comes after getting feedback from their PPC advertisers about wanting more clicks.

Writing on the adCenter blog, Tina Kelleher says, "After listening to your feedback around wanting to generate more clicks for your PPC campaigns on adCenter, we've made some enhancements that will not only provide extra ad visibility to help boost incoming traffic, but will also provide an improved layout and better search experience for our users...Results have been positive since the launch, so we're really excited to roll this out to the UK market."

Live Search added a fourth mainline in the U.S. last September. It must be working because search was a positive note in an otherwise unfavorable earnings report for Microsoft's recenetly reported second quarter.

Here's a screenshot of a search with the 4th ad:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 30, 2009

Live Search Launches Firefox Search Suggestion Add-On

Live Search has released an add-on for Firefox, interesting since Firefox is a competitor to Microsoft's browser Internet Explorer. The add-on enables search suggestions when using Live Search in the search box on Firefox.

The add-on is available for Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, and United States.

You can access the add-on here. It was created with an OpenSource standard and uses the JSON interface.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 21, 2009

Live Search Offers Tips for Optimizing Large Sites

If you have or work for a large site, search engine optimization can be quite the undertaking. Jeremiah Andrick over at the Live Search Webmaster blog is offering tips for optimizing for their particular engine.

Of course, he has an interesting case to work with: Microsoft.com.

The first tip he offered up was canonicalization, also known as normalization. This is the concept of only exposing URL per piece of content to the engines.

Next, Live Search addressed some of the optimization problems that can occur due having multiple URLs due to tracking, co-branding, etc.:

Add or remove the trailing /
- http://www.mysite.com/ to http://www.mysite.com
Remove the index or default
- http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx to http://www.mysite.com
- http://www.mysite.com/en/us/default.aspx to http://www.mysite.com/en/us
Avoid CamelCase — convert your text to lower case
- http://www.mysite.com/FooBar/ to http://www.mysite.com/foobar
Remove query string variables or rewrite to readable URLs
- http://www.mysite.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99&displaylang=en to http://www.mysite.com/downloads/en/family/ab99
Remove Port Numbers
- http://www.mysite.com:8080/ to http://www.mysite.com
Avoid exposing secure HTTPS version
- https://www.mysite.com/en/us/ to http://www.mysite.com/en/us

Andrick also recommends 301 redirects, using a consistent linking convention, avoiding linking to multiple versions of a page, and using absolute links. To read all of Andricks' recommendations, click here.

Also, be sure to check out the following posts on large site search engine optimization from Search Engine Watch and sister site ClickZ:

Large Sites, Small Headaches Link Building for Large Corporate Sites The Value of Big Sites Large Enterprise SEO: Content Development Large Enterprise SEO: CMS Duplicate Content Three SEM Tips for Big Media Sites Recruiting SEO Talent for Big Sites Big Brands Equal Big SEO Opportunities

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 19, 2009

Live Search Launches News Alerts Service

Microsoft's Live Search has launched a news alerts service. This service will let users know when a keyword they choose appears on a news website. This is similar to Google alerts.

Here's the process for setting up a Live Search alert:

Go to news.live.com.
Sign in with your Live ID (or get one if you haven't already).
From any page within news search (like the default page for top stories or the results page associated with a search), click the News alerts link (in the right column).
Click Create alert.

News alerts are a great tool for keywords or topics that you're perpetually searching. Let the results come to you.

What do you think about the new Live Search alerts? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

January 8, 2009

Three Major Announcements from Microsoft Regarding Live Search

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and President, Entertainment & Devices Division Robbie Bach took to the stage at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to make three major announcements about Live Search.

They are:

Dell: Beginning February 1, Dell will offer Live Search on the majority of its consumer and small business PCs in 23 countries around the world. Live Search will be the default search engine in the browser, and Dell will also include a Live Search-powered toolbar and Windows Live Essentials on new PCs. Last year, Microsoft struck a deal with HP to ship the Live Search toolbar on 2009 PCs.
Verizon Wireless: Verizon Wireless has selected Microsoft to provide portal, local and Internet search as well as mobile advertising services to customers on its devices beginning the first half of 2009. Microsoft beat out Google, who was also courting Verizon.
Live Search for Mobile: Microsoft is releasing an update to the Live Search for Mobile client for Windows Mobile phones. The update will include several new features, including Query Autosuggest, Bird's Eye View imagery, and LocateMe, which helps people automatically know their approximate location, even without GPS.

What do you think about these announcements? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

December 3, 2008

Live Search Flags Questionable Sites

Microsoft's Live Search is now flagging sites which they deem questionable in terms of malware. Users can still visit the site, but you'll have to click a special link in the warning box, as the main link has been disabled.

If you find that your site has been flagged (perhaps a third party hacked your site), you can use Live Search's webmaster tools to get back on track.

Here's a screenshot of what a warning would look like:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 2, 2008

Live Search Offers Instant Cashback, Responds to Black Friday Glitch

After a Black Friday blackout, Live Search is responding to the glitch and also offering a new update: Instant Cashback.

Cashback was down for about three hours last Friday and Live Search explained why with the following three reasons:

A significant spike in traffic caused the system to go down for several hours on Friday
The downtime was partly related to investigating the issue and partly to rebuilding and redeploying the databases and indexes that support Microsoft Live Search cashback.
The issues that caused Friday's problem have been resolved. We're confident we won't have further problems.

Contact Live Search support if you want to recoup your Cashback monies.

The new Instant Cashback is available via PayPal for eBay purchases. It will not be available for all users and you'll only know if you're one of the lucky ones after you make a purchase. If you're not, then you'll still get your Cashback deal in 60 days per the original plan.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 24, 2008

Live Search Adds Shopping and Flight Instant Answers

Microsoft's Live Search is adding more instant answers to the main search page. There are two new areas of instant answers being featured: Shopping and Flights.

For shopping, if you type in a keyword or phrase for the model of consumer product you're interested in, you'll get results for that product containing images with a price comparison and a links to the different e-tailers carrying that product. There's also a link to review and use Cashback to enhance your search.

For flights, simply type in Flights from (point A) to (point B) and, in conjunction with this year's acquired Farecast, you'll get a result for a flight with those destinations.

What do you think of these Instant Answer additions? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 13, 2008

Incentives Work: Microsoft Seeing Positive Results from Cashback Program; Partners with Shopping Cart Providers

It's easy to pick on Microsoft. It's practically a national pastime at this point. So when they announced their Cashback program to help grow Live Search, the snears came fast and furious.

"You have to pay people to search?" they said.

Turn your laughter into claps, people. It turns out that Cashback is working. Microsoft is seeing positive results on three goals it said it would report. They are:

Number of offers in the system
Advertiser return on investment (ROI)
Percentage of commercial search queries as measured by comScore

There's been a 30% increase in the number of products offered via Cashback. 4.5 million unique users per month are generating 68 million commercial queries. eBay has seen an increase of 50% on their ROI.

"We believe this early traction speaks to the differentiated and unique value proposition of Microsoft Live Search cashback for both consumers and advertisers, especially in these tough economic times," said Brad Goldberg, general manager of Microsoft Live Search.

Is it really any surprise that incentives work? No. Have you ever been listening to the radio and they're having a $1,000 giveaway? You have to be listening at the right times to call in. Incentives are nothing new. Microsoft was smart to implement them into Live Search. People don't necessarily use Google because it's any better but because it's familiar. Live Search needs a way to get people searching, and Cashback is working to help accomplish those goals.

That may be why Microsoft is expanding Cashback by partnering with shopping cart providers Miva Merchant, Early Impact Inc. (ProductCart) and 3DCart. Through the agreement, merchants who use the shopping carts are eligible for Cashback.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 7, 2008

Live Search Maps Enables Photosynth Search

The Live Search Maps team has made it easier for you to search for Photosynths. If you're not familiar, Photosynth was launched earlier this year and users can take multiple photos of a location and have it mashed up into a 3D image.

Now, if you want to find Photosynths of a certain location, go to Live Search Maps and enter in the location you're interested in. Once the results come up, look on the left hand sidebar for "Explore Collections" and click on it. Then look for a drop down menu next to the word "Show." Select Photosynths and any submissions related to the area you're searching will pop up.

Let's explore.

Say you're searching Live Search Maps for Boone, North Carolina. Look for "Explore Collections" on the left sidebar and click on it.

Next, select "Photosynth" from the drop down tab next to the word "Show." Not all searches will yield Photosynths - only the ones where photosynths exist, of course.

A list of results for Photosynths will appear. Select the one that suits your fancy by clicking on "Click to Launch Photosynth Viewer."

Then enjoy the lovely panorama of the Appalachian mountains - or wherever your map search takes you. :)

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 30, 2008

Live Search Implements Instant Answers Into Search Results

We know that searchers want answers, and there are plenty of answer sites out there to fuel their curiosity. Now, Microsoft's Live Search team is including some answers in their search results.

Encyclopedia, Traffic and Horoscope information will now display answers within results. For example, you can type in the question "How tall is Mount Everest?" and get the answer in the results.

I think search marketers will be happy about this. If you're trying to sell a product, it can be frustrating when people come to your site who have no intention of buying anything.

The Live Search team says even more answers will be included in the future.

What do you think about the update? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 20, 2008

Live Search's xRank Launches xTreme Movers

Live Search's buzz search product, xRank, has launched a new feature. It's called xTreme movers and it shows you what's gaining popularity the fastest.

I headed over to the site to check it out. Today's quick mover is Wii, as in Nintendo's super-fun gaming system.

As you can see, a graph shows you a visual representation of how the term is growing. To the left is a list of the top terms that are trending up.

What do you think of xTreme Movers? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 1, 2008

Microsoft Launches SearchPerks; Like Credit Card Rewards, Except for Search

Microsoft is today launching a new incentive program for Live Search. The program is called SearchPerks, and it works very much like a credit card reward program.

Every time you search, you earn tickets. You can earn up to 25 tickets a day. Tickets can later be redeemed for all sorts of rewards including music downloads (5 for 525 points) and airline miles (1000 miles for 1800 tickets).

Here's how it works. Sign up for the program, and download a simple piece of code. That will give you a Perk Counter for your desktop.

You can begin earning tickets today, October 1, all the way through April 15th of next year. You can begin claiming your rewards on April 16. However, you can only sign up for the program through December 31, 2008 and the program is capped at 250,000 people.

Microsoft will be evaluating the program and could possible expand it if all goes well.

Microsoft's Frederick Savoye, senior director at Live Search, assured me that this is an incentive program that fits into their three overall pillars of search:

Delivering the best search results
Simplifying key tasks such as booking airline, travel, shopping, finding user opinions, etc.
Innovating the business model

So while programs like SearchPerks and Cashback may seem like Microsoft is just trying to pay people off to use Live Search, the team remains strongly devoted to improving technology and the user experience.

What do you think of this program? Will you sign up? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

September 18, 2008

Powerset's First Integrations with Live Search

Microsoft acquired semantic search company Powerset earlier this year, and now the Live Search team is revealing the first integrations of Powerset with Live Search.

Freebase Answers Live Search wanted to include more of Live Search Answers, so they made use of Freebase, an open, shared database and something Powerset incorporates in its search.
Improved Wikipedia captions Live Search also used Powerset to improve its Wikipedia captions within the search results. Previously, the results showed sentence fragments, but now the caption is more substantial.
Improved Related Searches Live Search is incorporating Powerset's Factz engine to create the list of related searches on a given search.

What do you think of these integrations? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 12, 2008

Live Search to Be Integrated with Blackberry Browser and Maps

Microsoft and Research in Motion, the company behind the Blackberry, have announced a partnership regarding the smartphones and Live Search. Microsoft's search product will be integrated with Blackberry Browser and Blackberry Maps. Users will also be able to access Live Search via Mobile.Blackberry.com.

“This joint endeavor with RIM is a strategic indicator of our increased focus on securing broad-scale distribution for Live Search,” said Brian Arbogast, corporate vice president of the Mobile Services organization at Microsoft. “Microsoft is committed to extending our services across mobile platforms, and we are very pleased to be joining forces with RIM to help bring Live Search to millions of BlackBerry users worldwide.”

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 13, 2008

Microsoft's Live Maps Schools Google, Yahoo, Ask and AOL in Georgia Mapping

If you've been keeping up with the conflict in South Ossetia, perhaps you were curious about where the contentious events were occurring. I hope you ended up at Microsoft's Live Search Maps, because it is the only map of the top 5 search engines that could find both Tskhinvali, South Ossetia's self-declared capital, as well as Abkhazia, another separatist region where Russia has opened a second front.

Live Search Maps - Ts'khinvali

Live Search Maps - Abkhazia

Yahoo was the second best map. It found Tskhinvali after I typed in Microsoft's suggested spelling of Ts'khinvali. But the map was extremely zoomed in and you didn't have a sense of where you were until you zoomed out. It found Abkhazia with ease.

Yahoo Maps - Tskhinvali (can't find)

Yahoo Maps - Ts'khinvali (Microsoft's suggested spelling)

Yahoo Maps - Ts'khinvali zoomed out

Yahoo Maps - Abkhazia

Google found Ts'khinvali (even without the apostrophe), but an initial search for Abkhazia landed me in Glendale, California, at a business listing for an institute dedicated to policy in the Georgian region. Eventually, after searching for Ts'khinvali, a subsequent search for Abkhazia at least landed me in the correct region. But the problem was there were several results sprinkled across the troubled Georgia. Google has said it has had a hard time finding satisfying data for the region. They might want to try whatever Microsoft is having.

Google Maps - Ts'khinvali

Google Maps - Abkhazia, Glendale California

Google Maps - Abkhazia, Georgia

Ask.com's Maps and AOL's MapQuest couldn't find either city.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

August 11, 2008

Google Sits Out Olympic Search Results; Microsoft , Yahoo Take Home Medals

On Saturday night, while watching the Olympics, I learned that there is a British swimmer named Hannah Miley. As a mom of a 10 year old, I found this amusing as my daughter has been thoroughly obsessed with the Disney show Hannah Montana where the lead character is played by Miley Cyrus.

I was curious as to how the search engines would handle a search for Hannah Miley. Would the results be completely dominated by the increasingly scandalous teen queen? Or would there at least be one mention of the Olympic athlete?

First, I checked out Google. After all, they're the best search engine in the world and everyone knows it except people in China (who prefer Baidu) and southeast Asia (who prefer Yahoo). Perhaps we should learn something from this year's Olympic hosts and their neighbors.

Google had ZERO results for Hannah Miley the swimmer on their front page. They didn't even pull results from their news search product, which does have results about the swimmer - during the Olympics! Tsk. Tsk.

Next, I moved onto Microsoft's Live Search. I was greeted with an photo of an Olympic event as the background and part of their new home page design. The first result for Hannah Miley was about the British swimmer!

The main link was to NBCOlympics.com, who is partnering with Microsoft for the Olympics. Then there were several site search links below to send searchers automatically to more detailed information they might be looking for.

You might say that's cheating, that it's not part of some supreme algorithm. I say, it's useful and relevant information for searchers and most will not particularly care how it got there.

Plus, Microsoft did include a link to Hannah Miley's wikipedia page as part of their "regular" result, something the googlebot ignored.

Last, I headed to Yahoo. They served up some news results for the Hannah Miley search. The first one was for the British swimmer and the second was for the Disney star. Then the organic results are dominated by the latter, save for one result from Zimbio.com about the athlete.

So that's how the "big three" search engines are handling the 2008 Olympics. Microsoft clearly takes the gold, Yahoo is half-heartedly participating, and Google is sitting out the games altogether.

And if you think it's unfair of me to use a search for "Hannah Miley" as the basis for such a statement. Check out the screenshots below for a search for American superstar swimmer Michael Phelps and tell me who's serving up the best results. (This time Yahoo wins the gold!)

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 6, 2008

Microsoft Webmaster Tools Update

Microsoft has just released an update to their Webmaster Tools. It's a significant update, with lots of new functionality in it. My guess is that a large number of SEOs will adopt this new tool as a part of their tool set. Let's take a look at the opening screen:

As you can see, you start with a nice clean look. Note that this is a screen shot for Microsoft.com. Not every site has 186 million pages indexed ...

One of the new features is the "Crawl Issues" report. This provides information on 404 errors, pages blocked by the Robots Exclusion Protocol, and dynamic URLs that have excessively long query strings. One interesting sub-note is that the review guide I received says: "Live Search flags URLs that have exceptionally long query string that could lead our crawler into an infinite loop trying to crawl all the variations due to the large number of potential parameter combinations."

I though that the note about a potential infinite loop was pretty interesting. Clearly that would be a scenario that would dramatically affect the crawling and indexing of your site in a material way.

The Crawl Issues report also provides information on unsupported Content-Types. This will help webmasters pages that are not being indexed by Live Search because of the Content-Type returned by the pages.

Next up is the backlinks report. First, let's take a look at an example:

Once again, a nice clean look. Just being able to get at this data and download it is powerful. SEOs will want to make use of this for analyzing the backlinks of the site(s) they are working on. However, if you look more closely at the screen shot, you will see an example of the filtering capabilities in the product. Our example shows the backlinks for Microsoft.com being filtered to show only the links received from latimes.com.

Other filters are available. For example you can also filter the data based on top level domain. Overall the filtering capability allows you to dig a bit deeper into the content of your backlinks. Results in Webmaster Tools can also filter data by up to 2 subdomains or 2 sub-folders. This again can lead to faster analysis of the data.

The program does provide a download option, but it is limited to 1000 results. For sites with over 1000 backlinks, this will be a bit frustrating. Nonetheless, the ability to get at the data, and into a spreadsheet is an important addition.

In summary, this looks like a solid upgrade to Microsoft's Webmaster Tools offering. I think many SEOs will adopt this. The access to the backlinks data alone justifies giving the product a close look.

Posted by at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 4, 2008

Live Search Cashback Launches Back-to-School Rebates

Microsoft launched a limited time promotion today called Back-to-School Deal Days for Live Search cashback. The promotion lets customers save big (and in some cases double the rewards) from hundreds of participating online retailers.

The back-to-school season is the second largest retail season of the year. That bodes well for Microsoft's share of searches as they continue to compete with Yahoo for (a distant) second place. Live Search cashback offers ad-funded cash rebates to customers using the service. Live Search also offers price comparisons, making side-by-side price shopping quicker and easier. A recent survey from Deloitte found that during this back-to-school shopping season, 71 percent of households plan on spending less on back-to-school items than they have in previous years. With consumers feeling financial strain from higher gas and food prices, Live Search cashback is offering back-to-school shoppers extra savings to stretch their dollars further. Back-to-school savings start today and will run for a limited time during the month of August. How It Works: Online shoppers can search, shop and get cashback rebates from hundreds of participating online stores through the Microsoft Live Search cashback program, which launched in May. Current retailers include Barnes & Noble.com, Overstock.com, Sears, Foot Locker and Zappos.com, among many others. This month, the cashback return is even higher with Deal Days.

Here are a few examples of the bargains:

Rebate of 36 percent on Jordan Men's AJF 12 basketball shoes from Foot Locker Rebate of 18 percent on Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PCs from Zappos.com Rebate of 30 percent on The North Face Doubletrack backpacks from eBags Consumers can save money each time they use Live Search cashback. For every qualifying purchase, the shopper will be sent an e-mail message confirming the Live Search cashback savings. Consumers' cash can be claimed when their Live Search cashback balance hits at least $5, 60 days after the purchase. Microsoft will provide the rebate one of three ways: via PayPal, check or direct deposit into a bank account.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 1, 2008

SEW Experts: Look Out PageRank, There's a New Algorithm in Town

Microsoft recently published research on a new algorithm it calls BrowseRank, which is based on user behavior instead of linking patterns. Microsoft thinks this could be the answer to increased relevance in search results. But is it? In today's SEM Crossfire column, "Look Out PageRank, There's a New Algorithm in Town," Frank Watson and Kevin Newcomb share their thoughts on BrowseRank's potential, and potential pitfalls.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 20, 2008

Microsoft Adds Record Number of Employees, Rules Out Acquisitions

Last year, Microsoft added a record 11,200 employees last year, according the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Many of those employees were gained through acquisitions that are part of Microsoft's attempt to make a land grab in the search market.

The acquisition of aQuantive added 2,600 employees to Microsoft's payroll. Travel search site Farecast and enterprise search company Fast Search & Transfer out of Norway were also acquired by Microsoft in the past year.

But don't expect any more internet acquisitions anytime soon. Microsoft is ruling out buying up major internet real estate, such as Facebook, in the wake of its failed attempt to acquire Yahoo, according to the Financial Times. Steve Ballmer and Kevin Johnson told FT that search is a part of the larger goal of generating revenue from advertising.

Now it seems those goals will be pursued internally. Microsoft just announced plans to build a search technology center in Europe. And recently, they rolled out the Cashback program, which rewards searchers who conduct online shopping at Live Search.

Microsoft did make an ad-related acquisition recently, but it was for television ad solutions provider Navic Networks. Still, this looks like an attempt to catch Google, which released opened up its Television Ads in Adwords up to everyone last month after being in private beta since last summer.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 12, 2008

SEW Experts: Live Search Cashback vs. Google: A Case Study

It's an interesting marketing concept, but how do the Live Search results measure up to Google, the de-facto search engine standard? In today's Building Brand Equity column, "Live Search Cashback vs. Google: A Case Study," Erik Qualman performs a test of product-based queries on each finds the results promising, but mixed.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 29, 2008

SEW Experts: Microsoft Search CashBack: Stealing from Google?

Microsoft announced it will give cash back to people who use Live Search and subsequently click-through and make a purchase. In today's Building Brand Equity column, "Microsoft Search CashBack: Stealing from Google?," Erik Qualman notes that the Live Search CashBack program just might steal that cash (in the form of market share) back from Google.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 11, 2007

Interview with Microsoft's Grad Conn

My interview of the week is with Grad Conn of Microsoft. In the interview we take a detailed look at the unique nature of Health Related searches. Microsoft did a lot of user testing to learn about user's needs and their state of mind when they are searching.

Among the interesting conclusions was that users were generally dissatisfied with health search results. Many of the returned sites were simple too technical for them, and they were not helping them accomplish what they needed. A good part of this is that the users don't really know what questions to ask yet.

What Microsoft decided to do with this was create a dashboard. The dashboard includes a set of refinement links up the top. The refinement links are determined algorithmically, based on the most common related references in peer review journals. So if you search on diabetes, you will see the most common terms which are used in related journals when they write about diabetes. It's a nifty way to help users quickly refine their search, while providing the most current relevant links on the topic.

In addition, Live Search presents a list of articles inline on the results page in it's left column. These are articles that are targeted at helping the average consumer by providing information on the topic of their search. These sources are selected because of the authoritative nature of the source, and the material is generally introductory in nature, so a consumer can rapidly learn the basics.

It's a great example of vertical search in action - where specialized information is accessed in a custom way, and presented in a custom way to meet the unique needs of the audience.

Posted by at 9:25 AM | Permalink

November 16, 2007

Microsoft Exec Claims They Will Have 30% Search Market Share

Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division, said he thinks Microsoft can get a 40% share of the search market in the next 3-5 years, Reuters reported.

"Speaking at a UBS investor conference, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division, laid out the company's strategy to become a leader in the growing online advertising industry with a "10, 20, 30, 40" plan.

The plan, which represents Microsoft's aspirations over the next three to five years, calls on Microsoft to increase the company's share in Web search, page views, percentage of time on the Internet and percentage of advertising dollars.," Reuters stated.

Interesting projection given the six percent they have right now. Guess the buy out of Yahoo could be coming after all.

Posted by Frank Watson at 5:03 PM | Permalink

October 2, 2007

Henry: Portrait of a Search Engine Serial Killer

It's hard to pimp your Website in the city that never sleeps.

Especially when you're the Internet Outsider Insider.

The who? A man without fear: Blodget. No beta blockers needed!

On a two day killing spree, he slashed MSN, leaving Live Search Sucking Wind After All These Years. (Or days.)

Henry's Panama hat? Strategically dipped (hannibal lecter-like) below one eye. His corpse? Had a familiar face:Yahoo's Revenue Per Search Stinks.

Some search engines call him a space cowboy. Some call him the gangster of love.

Blodge The Ripper: Ripped Google's stock price a new one today: Google to $2,000 a Share?

A (stock) picker? A grinner. A joker? A sinner.

Henry: Portrait of a SErial Killer. Who's behind the Metamorphosis of Blodget's in-beta blogger's digi-bizWeb2.0site?

Stay 'tooned.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:28 PM | Permalink

October 1, 2007

Why Index Size is Important

UPDATE: There is an update from Microsoft at the end of this post.

One of the interesting things about Microsoft's new Live search update was the announcement that Microsoft had expanded its index from about 5B pages to about 20B pages, a 4x increase. At some level, the exact index size is not a big issue, unless, your index is simply too small.

Google has stopped reporting its index size, but reportedly has about 24B pages in its index. In my opinion, there is little significance in the difference between 20B and 24B pages in your index, but there is a significant difference between 5B and 24B pages in your index. In short, Microsoft needed to make a move of this type to improve their relevance.

What's at issue is coverage. People increasingly search for a highly specialized set of things on the web, and if you don't have the related sites in the index, you can't return the right result. During the announcement sessions, Microsoft demoed many search queries, but one that illustrates this point particularly well was a search for shelli segal.

A search for this term on Live Search will being up the designer's website. This happens even though the site has a relatively small number of third party web site links to it (106 according to Yahoo).

UPDATE: I got an email from Matt Cutts letting me know that the laundrybyshellisegal.com web site is out of operation, and has been that way for several months. This makes the specific example provided here invalid, but nonetheless the underlying point of this post is unchanged. I have asked Microsoft to provide a new example, and will update this post when I get that.

By comparison, if you search on Google, you quickly discover that Google does not have this web site in its index. Note that many counter examples are possible to show - sites in the Google index that Microsoft has in its index. Ultimately, the point is, you can't return the right result if the site you should be returning for a given search is not in your index.

Update from Justin Osmer of Microsoft:

"We crawled the site and did not receive any redirects, Like many other engines we rely on redirects and other Webmaster Tools help us stay fresh (like our URL removal process) but we know we can't rely on that alone and are still building out as scalable, broad, and updated of an index as we can and are continuing to improve.

As you state, we still stand by our original point and intention that a user won't get the relevant site if it isn't indexed and this particular (poor) example was used to illustrate the point that before we never would of have had it, then we did with the larger index...however, unfortunately in the time we built the index the most relevant site is no longer available and we hadn't re-crawled it yet. We have removed the site from the index now and are returning what we believe to be the most relevant set of results for that query. Our larger index will speed up its crawl frequency in time and situations like this will hopefully be minimized.

You had asked for some additional examples from the presentation Ramez gave so here they are:

Bigger index helping us: search for janet Buxman kurihara.

Core ranking examples:

Hottest temperature in the state of az:

Safeco building address Redmond:

Google results
Live results"

Posted by at 10:59 AM | Permalink

May 9, 2007

Microsoft has acquired a minority equity stake in job search engine CareerBuilder, owned jointly by newspaper companies Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy.

In addition, the 3-year-old agreement to display CareerBuilder results on the MSN network was extended through 2013. The agreement continues to be performance-based, with payments determined by the quality and quantity of traffic delivered by MSN. Under the agreement, CareerBuilder will pay MSN up to $443 million over the course of seven years to serve as the exclusive job search engine on the MSN Careers channel.

Microsoft will also begin deploying CareerBuilder results abroad, expecting to launch CareerBuilder on MSN sites in most European countries by the middle of 2008 with several rolling out by the end of 2007.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:20 PM | Permalink

Microsoft chairman and founder Bill Gates said yesterday that he plans on spending his remaining 15 to 18 months of active duty at the company focusing on building the company's search programs, in a broad sense. Gates announced last year that he would leave his day-to-day duties at Microsoft by the end of 2008, to focus on his philanthropy.

Speaking at the company's annual Strategic Account Summit for large advertisers and partners, Gates described an evolution of search from being destination-based to being more integrated into the online experience.

I mean, after all, today if you want to do a certain type of transaction, there's probably a specialized Web site you don't know about that's far better than just the general, say, search way of going about. Why can't we take, by using a platform-type approach, the best of those dedicated sites and bring them in so that you don't have to click on a tab or anything, you just type your words, and get that domain, those people who are expert are somehow incorporated into that.

So broadly thinking, it's about search, it's about buyers and sellers, and that will be my biggest thing. There are some things about getting the tablet driven into the mainstream, and about dramatic things in Office. And some of these will actually be the projects Steve is likely to pick for me to put my part-time work into, even after mid-2008.

Gates is echoing the message sent by Steve Berkowitz, SVP of Microsoft's Online Services Group, at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last month. During his keynote speech there, Berkowitz stressed the distinction between "destination search," where a user goes to a search site like Live.com or Google.com to conduct a search, and "convenient search," where a user searches wherever they are, such as on a page within the MSN portal, using instant messaging or e-mail applications, or from another site or service.

"I believe it's going to be about where you take the experience of search. I think that's more of what you're going to see us continue to do. To create innovative ways to deliver search in the experience you are. I see Microsoft having a great ability to do that," Berkowitz said.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:55 AM | Permalink

April 24, 2007

Abbey Klaassen of Advertising Age reports that Ad Age's Digital Fact Pack is available to download for free. Among the highlights in the second annual Digital Fact Pack are these gems:

-- The top 10 online properties took in 99% of 2006 gross online ad revenue. Or, as Klaassen puts it, "the Long Tail of the web has a big, fat head."

-- MySpace and Facebook continue to defy gravity, growing 72.5% and 59.2% (Feb. '07 vs. Feb. '06), respectively.

-- The top US Search engines are Google (51.83%), Yahoo Search (15.94%), MSN Search (9.13%), Google Image Search (6.02%), and Ask.com (2.15%), according to Hitwise. That's right, Google Image Search has a higher market share than Ask.com!

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:42 AM | Permalink

March 29, 2007

Webmasters observed earlier this week that the link: command at Live search was delivering either a blank page (my experience) or an error. It is not just broken. The link:, linkdomain: and inurl: commands have in fact recently been disabled at Live Search. Eytan Seidman, Lead Program Manager at Live Search notes:

The post also notes that Live Search is looking for a way to make it possible for legitimate queries to be made. So, look for further announcements down the road.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 8:44 AM | Permalink

January 26, 2007

Microsoft reported Q2 earnings last night, with overall ad revenue up, mostly from display ads and a "modest increase" in search.

"Advertising revenue grew 20 percent over the quarter and we're happy with that," said Chris Liddell, Microsoft's CFO. "On the search side, we lost market share, and we're clearly not happy with that."

Increasing search queries contributed to search revenue growth on a year-over-year basis for the first time since the transition from Yahoo's paid search ads to AdCenter in the U.S. last year. But Microsoft is scaling back its revenue forecast from search this year, estimating revenue growth in the online services business between 3% and 8% for the year and 4% to 10% this quarter.

According to comScore's December numbers, Microsoft had a 10.5% share of searches last month -- down from just over 14% at the end of 2005.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:37 AM | Permalink

December 18, 2006

Following Yahoo's release on December 4 of its top searches for 2006, last week AOL, Lycos and MSN Live released their top searches for the year 2006. Google still has their 2005 review at Zeitgeist, along with recent monthly totals. Ask.com presents weekly lists, but has yet to release a 2006 year in review.

A closer look at these lists reveals some interesting questions about the differences in the data from engine to engine.

Looking at the slight differences between this data can be an interesting project, and can probably yield some good insight into both the user demographics of each of the engines

Paris Hilton is an interesting example to use in showing how search engines classify types of searches. In Yahoo! and in AOL, Paris is listed as a celebrity, yet she is found in top News searches for MSN Live. Does this mean that people search Live's (formerly search.msn.com) News category when they look for everyone's favorite socialite?

More can undoubtedly be read into the top overall searches reported for each portal. AOL reports: "weather" (does this mean they included all weather-inclusive searches or just the term "weather?"); Yahoo! says Britney Spears is number one (hmm...wonder if that includes people misspelling it?); MSN Live claims that the world wanted to know about Ronaldinho more than anyone or thing else; and Lycos puts Poker at number one. Again, others can fill in the blanks as to what they think the demographics most closely associated with each portal are.

It will be interesting to see what the top Google searches are. It would also be nice to have some more details as to how many misspellings were included in searches and perhaps how many of the searches for each top term were actually contained in a longer keyword phrase.

See also the discussions about this at the Yahoo! Search Blog, and the MSN Blog post that introduced their list. AOL has opened up the floor for discussion at the AOL Search Blog (thanks Susan for the link!). Lycos provides a platform for discussion which can be found at the Lycos 50 Blog. (Thanks Carolyn!)

(Note this story was edited after I discovered that Paris Hilton did make the top celebrity list at AOL. For some reason I missed that originally. Apologies to the AOL team for this oversight. CB)

Posted by Chris Boggs at 10:58 AM | Permalink

November 30, 2006

The Live Search Blog described how you can verify if the MSNBot you see crawling your site, is truly the MSNBot from Microsoft or some rogue spider trying to steal your content. Microsoft has added a way to look up the reverse DNS information for the IP of the bot and described what you should see, to ensure that it is the official MSNBot, if it is not, then you may want to block it or report it to Microsoft. A step by step guide is at the Live Search Blog.

What about Googlebot? We covered that here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:01 AM | Permalink

November 22, 2006

The other day I reported that Microsoft Banning Sites from Live.com For Link Exchanges, where I uncovered an email sent to a Webmaster. The email stated that a particular site was removed from the Live.com Search index because the site was "acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content." The email also added that these types of links are "spam links," and is the reason the site was delisted from the index.

It struck me that this is why Google and Yahoo remain very vague when telling Webmasters why their sites are deindexed or penalized. Simply, people may look at this email and figure that exchanges links with your friends is a bad thing. If you have a personal blog about your life and you wanted to link to your dad's dental practice web site, there is nothing wrong with that. But if you do run huge link exchanges, then you need to be worried. The email sent to this Webmaster might not be clear enough to explain the difference, and get other Webmasters worried.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:28 AM | Permalink

November 10, 2006

Boogybonbon.com has revealed how you can potentially de-list your competitor's site from Microsoft's search engine. In short, most sites return a 200 status header for when you go to a page like domain.com/index.html?test=test or domain.com/index.html?test=test1234, etc. You can play on that by convincing Microsoft that a particular site has hundreds or thousands of duplicate pages, and at some point, Microsoft may penalize the site with a duplicate content penalty, where they de-list your site and home page. That is the short story, if you want the long write up visit Boogybonbon.com.

Postscript: Other coverage at Threadwatch and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:32 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2006

Microsoft's Live Search Blog informed us of a new feature where you can add the Windows Live Search box to your site. I have implemented the "Basic Search Box" on the Search Engine Roundtable, which means the box will display results on the Windows Live Search page. Below I will implement the "Advanced Search Box," which means the box displays results on this site. More details at http://search.live.com/siteowner.

var WLSearchBoxConfiguration= { "global":{ "serverDNS":"search.live.com" }, "appearance":{ "autoHideTopControl":false, "width":600, "height":400 }, "scopes":[ { "type":"web", "caption":"SEW & SER Test", "searchParam":"site:searchenginewatch.com OR site:seroundtable.com" } , { "type":"web", "caption":"Web", "searchParam":"" } ] }

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:38 AM | Permalink

August 29, 2006

Yahoo patent filings include one detailing bidding for placement in paid search filed this past April, another that details a very interactive environment for watching television programming, a third describing a method of soliciting consumer reviews, and a granted patent for a Voice Over IP (VOIP) system that doesn't require Telephony Interface Cards.

Microsoft had two new patent applications published, including one which provides a means of suggesting alternative spellings for words, and another that interacts with searchers to help them construct queries.

IBM filed a patent application for building social networks within a business organization, and was granted a patent for a method of checking pages shown in search results for viruses.

America Online looks at the classification of queries in a manner which seems very similar to the editorial opinion decisions made in a recently granted Google patent.

Mobile search company Geovector comes up with a way to make quick hyperlinked image maps from mobile phones with cameras.

Yahoo

System and method for enabling multi-element bidding for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine Invented by Ted Meisel, Peter Savich and Thomas A. Soulanille Assigned to Overture US Patent Application 20060190354 Published August 24, 2006 Filed on April 24, 2006

Abstract

Framework for providing ancillary content in a television environment Invented by Michael Mills, Philip Mckay, Michael Hoch, Kumiko Tanaka Toft, and Rod Perkins US Patent Application 20060184579 Published August 17, 2006 Filed on January 5, 2006

Abstract

Group polling for consumer review Invented by Norman Shi Assigned to Yahoo US Patent Application 20060190475 Published August 24, 2006 Filed on December 20, 2005

Abstract

Voice integrated VOIP system Invented by Madhu Yarlagadda, Patrick Loo and David H. Nakayama Assigned to Yahoo United States Patent 7,095,733 Granted August 22, 2006 Filed on September 11, 2000

Abstract

Microsoft

Query spelling correction method and system Invented by Justin Harmon, Kyle G. Peltonen and Shajan Dasan Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060190447 Published August 24, 2006 Filed on February 22, 2005

Abstract

Dynamic client interaction for search Invented by Matthew R. Richardson and Robert J. Ragno Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060190436 Published August 24, 2006 Filed on June 23, 2005

Abstract

IBM

Method, system and program product for building social networks Invented by Margaret A. Strong and Albert Tien Yuen Wong Assigned to IBM US Patent Application 20060190536 Published August 24, 2006 Filed on February 23, 2005

Abstract

Virus checking and reporting for computer database search results Invented by Cary Lee Bates, Robert James Crenshaw, Paul Reuben Day and John Matthew Santosuosso Assigned to IBM United States Patent 7,096,215 Granted August 22, 2006 Filed on January 13, 2004

Abstract

America Online

Web query classification Invented by Abdur R. Chowdhury, Steven Michael Beitzel, David Dolan Lewis and Aleksander Kolcz US Patent Application 20060190439 Published August 24, 2006 Filed on January 27, 2006

Abstract

Geovector

Imaging systems including hyperlink associations Invented by Thomas William Ellenby, Peter Malcolm Ellenby and John Ellenby Assigned to GeoVector Corporation US Patent Application 20060190812 Published August 24, 2006 Filed on February 22, 2005

Abstract

My usual reminder about patents: Some of the processes and technology described in patents are created in house, and some are developed with the assistance of contractors and partners. A percentage are never developed in a tangible manner, but may serve as a way to attempt to exclude others from using the technology, or even to possibly mislead competitors into exploring an area that they might not have an interest in (sometimes skepticism is good.)

There are times when a Google or Yahoo acquires a company to gain access to the intellectual property of that company, or the intellectual prowess and expertise of that company's employees. And sometimes patents are just purchased.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 2:33 PM | Permalink

August 27, 2006

Google looks at search history and user behavior to rerank results and offer ecommerce recommendations, provides a way to rewrite navigation on web pages for users of a proxy system to access the web, and shows some of the inner workings of Desktop Search.

IBM was granted a patent based upon providing advertisements to people based upon sites that they have visited, another that allows people to download information from specified pages which can be indexed and searched locally, a way of speeding up pagerank, and a method for organizing bookmarks.

Microsoft published a couple of patent applications, one which looks at using game playing to provide user rankings for web pages, and a method of providing contextual advertisements for non-textual content.

Napster's peer-to-peer filing sharing system is described in a patent originally filed in August, 2000.

Google

This patent from Google describes a way to use past search history and user behavior to rerank search results and provide ecommerce based recommendations.

Interface and system for providing persistent contextual relevance for commerce activities in a networked environment Invented by Donald R. Turnbull and Hinrich Schuetze Assigned to Google United States Patent 7,089,237 Granted August 8, 2006 Filed on January 26, 2001

Abstract

Rewriting parts of pages through a proxy server, for use with mobile devices, is the focus of this patent granted to Google. It shows a method of understanding what parts of a page is navigation, in addition to determining which navigation may be ideally rewritten for a handheld.

Identifying navigation bars and objectionable navigation bars Invented by Chade-Meng Tan and Daniel Dulitz Assigned to Google United States Patent 7,089,490 Granted August 8, 2006 Filed on November 30, 2000

Abstract

One of the inventors listed in the following patent application, Tomas Gunnarsson, is a Google Desktop Software Engineer according to a post he made in the Google Blog on a "quick search" for Desktop Search. It appears that this patent filing looks at some of the inner workings of Desktop Search.

Access to a target object with desired functionality Invented by Johann Tomas Sigurdsson and Tomas Gunnarsson Assigned to Google US Patent Application 20060179441 Published August 10, 2006 Filed on February 10, 2005

Abstract

IBM

As a person surfs the web, the process in this patent describes a way of collecting keywords from pages visited to target appropriate advertising for that user.

Method and apparatus for providing reduced cost online service and adaptive targeting of advertisements Invented by Viktors Berstis and Herman Rodriguez Assigned to IBM United States Patent 7,089,194 Granted August 8, 2006 Filed on June 17, 1999

Abstract

Method and system for searching for web content Invented by Michael James Osias Assigned to IBM United States Patent 7,089,233 Granted August 8, 2006 Filed on September 6, 2001

Abstract

System and method for rapid computation of PageRank Invented by John Anthony Tomlin, Andrew S. Tomkins, and Arvind Arasu Assigned to IBM United States Patent 7,089,252 Granted August 8, 2006 Filed on April 25, 2002

Abstract

Conditional promotion of bookmarks Invented by Cary L. Bates, Gilford F. Martino, John M. Santosuosso, and Vincent T. Timon, III Assigned to IBM United States Patent 7,089,305 Granted August 8, 2006 Filed on September 25, 2001

Abstract

Microsoft

Improving quality of web search results using a game Invented by Luis von Ahn Arellano and Josh D. Benaloh Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060179053 Published August 10, 2006 Filed on February 4, 2005

Abstract

Image and other analysis for contextual ads Invented by Carl M. Kadie, Joshua T. Goodman, and Christopher A. Meek Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060179453 Published August 10, 2006 Filed on February 7, 2005

Abstract

Outland Research

Napster

System and method for searching peer-to-peer computer networks by selecting a computer based on at least a number of files shared by the computer Invented by Wilburt Juan Labio, Giao Thanh Nguyen, Winston Wencheng Liu, Gurmeet Singh Manku Assigned to Napster United States Patent 7,089,301 Granted August 8, 2006 Filed on August 11, 2000

Abstract

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 11:34 PM | Permalink

August 25, 2006

It appears that all the major search engines have been reported to be updating their indexes in some way. Google is updating back links at some of the Google data centers. Yahoo has been recently reported to have updated its algorithm or index, although there is no official word from Yahoo on this as of yet. And MSN Search has confirmed that an update has occurred to their index recently. While Google's update may not be represented in the index, Yahoo and MSN's updates have reports that the search results have indeed changed. For the better or worse - that is in the eyes of the beholder.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:52 AM | Permalink

August 14, 2006

Sites in search results that rank highly while serving visitors only ads are the target of a number of papers by Microsoft, submitted to the SIGIR 2006 conference held last week. Michael Hickins wrote about them in Microsoft: Noise Improves Search Results, and Jeremy Reimer adds more details in Microsoft Research Peers into Search.

Both offer nice overviews of the papers presented by Microsoft at the conference, which cover topics such as query analysis, user behavior, and personalization. Eight of the thirteen papers are available at the Microsoft Research pages. If you are interested in how Microsoft might be ranking, and reranking, pages based upon measurements of human behavior, you may want to dive into some of these papers. A good starting point might be Learning User Interaction Models for Predicting Web Search Result Preferences (pdf), which details their approach to seeing how users' clicks and other activities might help them predict preferences for web search results.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 3:27 PM | Permalink

August 8, 2006

This last week's patent applications involving search all seem to focus upon users of search engines, and finding ways to fulfill intentions behind searches.

There are a couple from Stanford professor Louis Rosenberg and his company Outland Research, that focus upon a searcher's personal interests and attributes, and two from America Online involving dictionary searches and meta searches. Microsoft also has a pair of patent filings on interesting ways to refine search results after a search has been conducted. And, IBM comes up with a related duo on measuring how documents served as search results are used, including an incentive feature for users to provide information about those documents.

Outland Research

The first of Outland Research's patent applications reranks search results based upon the age or the gender, or both, of a searcher. The second reranks results based upon the personal background of the searcher.

Methods and apparatus for using user gender and/or age group to improve the organization of documents retrieved in response to a search query Invented by Louis B. Rosenberg Assigned to Outland Research,. LLC US Patent Application 20060173556 Published August 3, 2006 Filed: January 27, 2006

Abstract

Methods and apparatus for using personal background data to improve the organization of documents retrieved in response to a search query Invented by Louis B. Rosenberg Assigned to Outland Research, LLC US Patent Application 20060173828 Published August 3, 2006 Filed: December 9, 2005

Abstract

America Online

America Online provides a process that can take membership in a community as a factor when returning results in a dictionary lookup, and a process involving meta search which may involve modifying queries to match a user's intentions, and scoring and sorting results to be served.

Retrieving and providing contextual information Invented by Carl Bruecken Assigned to America Online US Patent Application 20060173806 Published August 3, 2006 Filed: October 31, 2005

Abstract

Search fusion

Invented by Abdur R.Chowdhury and Gregory S. Pass US Patent Application 20060173817 Published August 3, 2006 Filed: December 29, 2004

Abstract

Microsoft

Microsoft's patent applications allow a user to further refine results based upon user feedback. The first enables the selection of attributes associated with results, such as positive and negative opinions associated with the subject of the search. The second process involves the creation of a user survey to enable a searcher to comment upon search results to help train the search engine, and also refine that particular search.

System and method for grouping by attribute Invented by Eric B. Watson Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060173819 Published August 3, 2006 Filed: January 28, 2005

Abstract

System and method for generating contextual survey sequence for search results

Invented by Eddie L. Mays and Oliver Hurst-Hiller Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060173820 Published August 3, 2006 Filed: January 28, 2005

Abstract

IBM

IBM's documents also take hints from user behavior to define search results. The first looks at how documents returned during a search are utilized by a searcher, such as whether they are viewed or printed out or bookmarked, by the searcher. The second builds upon that one by defining a process where rewards or credits may be awarded to a user for providiing document use information.

Systems, methods, and media for utilizing electronic document usage information with search engines Invented by Viktors Berstis and Randolph Michael Forlenza Correspondence Name and Address: IBM US Patent Application 20060173818 Published August 3, 2006 Filed: January 11, 2005

Abstract

Systems, methods, and media for awarding credits based on provided usage information Invented by Viktors Berstis and Randolph Michael Forlenza Correspondence Name and Address: IBM US Patent Application 20060173837 Published August 3, 2006 Filed: January 11, 2005

Abstract

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our a href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forumdisplay.php?f=21">Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 6:52 AM | Permalink

August 4, 2006

Yesterday, I thought I discovered Yahoo stealing searching from Google, but I did not, Rand discovered it. Basically, if you do a search on Yahoo for google, Yahoo puts up a Yahoo Shortcut asking you "Want to search the Web?" with Yahoo? Is this fair? Is this respectable? Who cares... But is this relevant?

Navigational searches are important. Does Google throw up a OneBox result doing the same? No, they do not. Yahoo doesn't do it for MSN or Ask.com, only for Google. When I asked GoodROI to ask Tim Converse of Yahoo on his WebmasterRadio show last night, Tim replied that he was unaware of that result but it is possible that it may be a joke. Meaning, sometimes the search engines play jokes with each other.

When I went over to Ask.com to do a search on Google, I got this Smart Answer that is incredibly useful and relevant (IMO) to this search.

When I went over to MSN yesterday I did not get anything special. But today, it seems MSN is playing the joke on Google & Yahoo but not on Ask. They ask "Want to search the Web? Try MSN Search" with the search box to MSN.

So now we have Yahoo and MSN both playing this game. Google doesn't do anything much special for these navigation searches. And Ask.com shows a detailed Smart Answer with details of each search company.

Why does Yahoo and MSN do this? Well, as I said it is most likely because Yahoo and MSN are portals. They attract less web savvy individuals and when they search at Yahoo or MSN, they may not understand that they are actually searching. Sounds kind stupid, but this is the case.

Matt Cutts of Google commented in the SEOMoz post saying;

So Chris Boggs decided to play artist and make a Did you mean? result in Google for good search engine, it does not really work, but he wanted to have fun.

I doubt this is just a joke between search engines. For a high volume keyword, trust me, it is high volume, like "Google," search engines typically play jokes with each other.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:51 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2006

There are a number of new patent applications from Yahoo, including one that utilizes concept networks to understand the intention behind a user's query; another describing an addition to a user interface that lets a searcher define the context of a search; an API approach to retrieve information from fast changing dynamic sites such as job listing sites, news site personals, or online auction sites; a way to use the contents of a first set of results from the search engine to find relevant pages from a second set of results, including both paid and organic results; a process of dynamically modifying the layout of a page so that the most important content is likely to be seen by a visitor; and a remote filtering system for filtering spam for client-based email programs.

Microsoft unveils a patent application that could be the inspiration for Windows Live QnA, a process for removing unlinked documents from a search engine's index, an approach for presenting relevant snippets with search results, a means of using cached search results for queries with relevant advertising results, and a query refinement process based upon past user behavior.

IBM provides a linguistic approach to identifying the main body text of a page, and they present that approach as an improvement upon methods such as a VIPS or a Visual Gap Segmentation process.

Yahoo

Systems and methods for managing and using multiple concept networks for assisted search processing Inventors: Shyam Kapur, Jignashu Parikh, and Deepa Joshi Assigned to Yahoo US Patent Application 20060167896 Published July 27, 2006 Filed on December 5, 2005

Abstract

Systems and methods for contextual transaction proposals Inventors: Reiner Kraft, Andreas Hartmann, Farzin Maghoul Assigned to Yahoo US Patent Application 20060167857 Published July 27, 2006 Filed on May 12, 2005

Abstract

System and method for improving online search engine results

Inventors: Daniel Patrick Dissett, Arkady Borkovsky, Charles Converse Carson, JR. Assigned to Yahoo! Inc. US Patent Application 20060167852 Published July 27, 2006 Filed on January 28, 2005

July 11, 2006

Twelve Google patent applications where published this past week, including seven that focus upon geographical information and local search.

(1) How good a match ads may be to the content on pages they are served upon through a program like Adsense. (2) A process for improving the targeting of ads. (3) Real time transportation data for travelers. (4) An exploration of ad layouts. (5) An automated advertising approval process. (6) Reasons for location-based businesses to use local area advertising, including an improved pay-per-call process.

(7) How the most authoritative local search results are identified. (8) The use of visual gap segmentation to separate information on different parts of pages, with implications beyond local search. (9) Ties business locations with regional areas. (10) A method for reducing ambiguity in geographic location. (11) Deciding whether regular or local results might be shown when at least one query term might be geographical in nature. (12) Assigning confidence scores between business identity and location information on a page.

Microsoft adds two more, on the validity of links, and on the validity of anchor text in links. They have very similar names, and cover topics that are related, but the processes involved are very different.

Google

This first patent filing discusses some of the factors that the search engine may look at to determine whether or not an ad served on a page a good match for that page and possibly the category that page may be within, including some user behavior information such as whether or not ads are selected, how long a viewer remains on a page, and if a conversion is made.

Associating features with entities, such as categories of web page documents, and/or weighting such features Inventors: Ross Koningstein, Stephen Lawrence, and Valentin Spitkovsky US Patent Application 20060149710 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

The process detailed in the next patent application aims at improving the relevancy of ads, and helping in suggesting targeted terms by allowing an advertiser to submit broad targeting information. While serving ads using that information, the search engine would log and collect search query terms, and possibly concepts and concept keywords, associated with the serving of the ad, and suggest candidate targeting keywords or phrases to the advertiser from those logs.

Suggesting and/or providing targeting information for advertisements Inventors: Ross Koningstein US Patent Application 20060149625 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Traffic assistance similar to that provided by Google acquisition Zipdash is the focus of the next document, and Zipdash is named as a service that would use this process. Some integration of local search and advertising is hinted at in the filing.

Transportation routing Inventors: Henry Rowley, and Shumeet Baluja US Patent Application 20060149461 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 31, 2004

Abstract

How are the layouts of ads best optimized? What size fonts are used, and how many ads are displayed on pages? Google explores some of those concepts, and notes that the presentation ideas for ads in the following document also may be used to present news items on search results pages.

Ad rendering parameters, such as size, style, and/or layout, of online ads Inventors: Shumeet Baluja, Vibhu Mittal, and Mehran Sahami US Patent Application 20060149622 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Automating the approval process for paid ads could benefit Google and advertisers. What would such an approval process entail? The next document identifies a number of issues involved in approving an ad, and in followups on advertisements. It also describes a whitelist for exceptions to some of the policies that may keep ads from being approved.

Advertisement approval Inventors: Gregory Joseph Badros, Robert J. Stets, and Lucy Zhang US Patent Application 20060149623 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

An advertisement for use with an online ad serving system may be automatically checked for compliance with one or more policies of the online ad serving system. If the advertisement is approved, then it is allowed by be served by the ad serving system. Follow up checks of the advertisement may be scheduled. One follow up check may be to test a landing page of the advertisement for compliance with policies. If the advertisement is not approved, hints for making the ad comply with one or more violated policies may be provided to an advertiser associated with the ad, and/or an ad serving system customer service representative. Determining whether or not to approve the advertisement may include determining violations of one or more policies by the advertisement, and, for each of the violations, determining whether or not to exempt the violation.

Google Local Patent Applications

The following patent applications primarily look at local search, though some of the processes described within them may have broader reaching implications, such as the one on visual segmentation of information on pages.

Businesses associated with a specific location often don't use paid search as part of their advertising strategy. This first patent application thoughtfully goes into some of the reasons why, and explores ways to make it a more attractive medium, including expanded pay-per-call functionality, as well as providing information such as business hours and types of payment accepted.

Generating and/or serving local area advertisements, such as advertisements for devices with call functionality Inventors: Shumeet Baluja and Henry A. Rowley US Patent Application 20060149624 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

How does a local search determine which document is the most relevant and authoritative one to return at the top of a local search list? A number of factors are considered in this next set of described processes.

Authoritative document identification Inventors: Daniel Egnor and Geeta Chaudhry US Patent Application 20060149800 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

If you are familiar with Microsoft's research on VIPS: a VIsion based Page Segmentation Algorithm, some of the ideas in the next document may sound a little familiar. Imagine a page that includes restaurant reviews for a number of restaurants in a city neighborhood. Might the information from that page be segmented, so that reviews for each of the restaurants can be included in results for the right restaurants in a local search? This visual gap approach might be helpful in that endeavor.

The document also notes that this process might be helpful in determining what an image is about, and in indexing them. It also mentions that it could help the search engine understand what the different parts of a page are, and how much value they have (for instance, distinqusihing between content and navigation.)

Document segmentation based on visual gaps Inventors: Daniel Egnor US Patent Application 20060149775 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

While a search engine may be able to determine where a business related to a page is located, it may want to associate that location with a geographical region. Something like a Hierarchical Triangular Mesh may be used to help in making that association.

Indexing documents according to geographical relevance Inventors: Daniel Egnor US Patent Application 20060149774 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

It's not always clear what the geographic location of a webpage is, based upon information presented on individual pages, though sometimes that type of information exists on the pages. The process displayed in this next filing tries to take information that may be spread out on a page, and tie it together to identify a location.

Classification of ambiguous geographic references Inventors: Daniel Egnor US Patent Application 20060149742 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Imagine if a search engine could serve either regular web search results or local results. Some search queries could be ambiguous, and may make it difficult to determine whether to serve local search information or general web search results. The inventors of the next document provide some ideas that may reduce some of that ambiguity a little.

Location extraction Inventors: Daniel Egnor and Lawrence Elias Greenfield US Patent Application 20060149734 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

The title of this patent application, and the previous one are so similar, that I was concerned they might be duplicates when I uncovered them. The one above attempts to "extract" location information from a query. This next one attempts to "extract" location information from pages being indexed, with confidence scores indicating how likely it is that business information on a page is associated with an address on the same page.

Local item extraction Inventors: Michael Dennis Riley US Patent Application 20060149565 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Microsoft

The titles of two Microsoft patent applications are very similar, but the processes described aren't. The first one looks at anchor text in links, and the titles to pages those links point to, to see if the anchor text is accurate. The second one looks at links on pages, using the Document Object Model, and tries to determine if they are valid links while simulating the experience of a user of the page viewing it with a browser. This may help a search engine understand dynamic html menus, and view links that may otherwise be unavailable to a search engine crawler.

Methods and apparatus for the evaluation of aspects of a web page Inventors: Michael A. Starbird Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060150076 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Methods and apparatus for evaluating aspects of a web page Inventors: Ryan Farber Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060150111 Published July 6, 2006 Filed on December 30, 2004

Abstract

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 8:55 PM | Permalink

June 30, 2006

I reported over the Search Engine Roundtable that Yahoo's and MSN's relationship is coming to an official end this month. The official Yahoo announcement can be seen here and it states, "MSN's U.S. search distribution agreement with Yahoo! Search Marketing ends this month, and Yahoo! Sponsored Search listings will no longer appear in MSN's U.S. search results." MSN has been displaying mostly Microsoft adCenter ads on their search results pages for a couple months now. So the transition has been pretty gradual for advertisers and searchers.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:42 AM | Permalink

June 27, 2006

Microsoft's patent applications from the end of last week include ways for search engines to scan malicious web sites, clustering queries for more relevant searches, and extracting feature and formatting information from pages. IBM introduces a new query dependent page ranking algorithm, and a way to preload the URLs of a site into your history file before you've ever visited. Xerox searches for more meaningful snippets, Alcatel takes the PC out of search, and replaces it with TV, and British Telecommunications describes a way to make user profiles more helpful in returning search results.

Microsoft

This patent filing looks at user logs for web queries, and user feedback associated with those queries in an attempt to try to cluster the queries, and serve more relevant results in response to those queries.

Clustering Web Queries Invented by Ji-Rong Wen, Jian-Yun Nie, Ming-Jing Li, and Hong-Jiang Zhang Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060136455 Published on June 22, 2006 Filed on February 23, 2006

Abstract

In this next document, Microsoft looks at how data on a web page can be extracted from the page, and parsed into information about the content on the page with its associated formatting, frequency of appearance, associated meta data, titles, and more. Statistics can be used to help understand the relevance of a query to the information extracted from a page.

Ranking search results using feature extraction Invented by Dmitriy Meyerzon and Hang Li Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060136411 Published on June 22, 2006 Filed on December 21, 2004

Abstract

The following patent application looks at ways of detecting malicious content on pages, during a crawl of the web, and in real time as a query is performed. I was reminded of Scandoo and a recent paper from Ben Edelman and SiteAdvisor, The Safety of Internet Search Engines, when reading it.

System and method for utilizing a search engine to prevent contamination Invented by Art Shelest and Eytan D. Seidman Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060136374 Published on June 22, 2006 Filed on December 17, 2004

Abstract

IBM

When you visit a site that you have previously been to before, your browser address bar will often show you pages on that site that you've seen, in a dropdown. This can help you return to a page that you may have been trying to return to. It might be helpful if this kind of feature was available on sites that you haven't visited before. Imagine arriving at a site you haven't seen previously, and being able to download a list of the URLs on the site.

The method in this filing involves a plugin to help a visitor find URLs of pages by providing an autocomplete, and a dropdown selection of URLs for pages on the site. URLs from the site could be added in the browser to its history files, an auto-complete file, and a site-map file.

Method and system for advanced downloading of URLS for WEB navigation Invented by Derek Kwan Assigned to IBM US Patent Application 20060136453 Published June 22, 2006 Filed on September 8, 2005

Abstract

A method for ranking pages in relation to a query; unlike pagerank, this method is query dependent and ranks pages associated with specific queries.

Dynamically ranking nodes and labels in a hyperlinked database Invented by Krishna Prasad Chitrapura and Srinivas Raaghav Kashyap Assigned to IBM US Patent Application 20060136098 Published on June 22, 2006 Filed on December 17, 2004

Abstract

Xerox

Snippets shown in search results could be more reflective of the intent of a searcher, and help a searcher locate a document that best matches what they are looking for, instead of just displaying text that contains the keywords searched for. That's the focus of the next patent filing.

Systems and methods for using and constructing user-interest sensitive indicators of search results Invented by Daniel G. Bobrow; Ronald M. Kaplan Assigned to Xerox US Patent Application 20060136385 Published on June 22, 2006 Filed on December 21, 2004

Abstract

Alcatel

Alcatel describes how to search for content to display on television through a televison set box, without using a computer.

Method and system enabling Web content searching from a remote set-top control interface or device Invented by Prasad Golla Assigned to Alcatel US Patent Application 20060136383 Published on June 22, 2006 Filed on December 20, 2004

Abstract

British Telecommunications

This last patent filing looks towards the use of user profiles to help make more relevant searches.

Searching apparatus and methods Invented by Gary M. Ducatel and Behnam Azvine US Patent Application 20060136405 Published on June 22, 2006 Filed on January 23, 2004

Abstract

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 6:47 PM | Permalink

June 26, 2006

This morning I uncovered two threads at WebmasterWorld that provide information on MSN from spam defense to when search indexes get updated. The first is named MSN Asks Webmasters, What is Spam? where MSNdude provides some insights into how MSN determines what is spam, what are junk pages and determining the "hierarchy of spam." The second is named MSN Won't Do a Search Index Update on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays where we see MSNdude posting that normally MSN will not conduct a search index update on Saturdays and Sundays, and also they are unlikely to conduct an update on Fridays, because it may affect their weekends.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:43 AM | Permalink

June 20, 2006

We have been poking hard at Google for disappointing search results, but Google is not the only search engine that has been disappointing me recently. You can group Yahoo and MSN and even Ask.com into the search engines that I have been disappointed with.

Over at the Search Engine Roundtable, I cover what I call "forum buzz," the discussions taking place within the SEM/SEO community. I tend to pick up on algorithm shifts and post the details at my site.

Today, I covered two threads, one I named Yahoo! Also Easy To Spam and the other MSN Asks Webmasters What Are Quality & Authoritative Sites. But what really got me was Danny's postscript on Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible showing Yahoo has a similar issue.

Typically, I have always had a search engine to fall back on when one wasn't "doing it for me." Today, I don't have that search engine. Google pushed me over the edge with the Sub Sub Domain Issues. Yahoo is easy to spam with comment spam (ummm, nofollow not working?), and MSN is being laughed at, IMO. Ask.com, they are good, but way too slow to update at this point.

To make it even worse, Google still refuses to take a stand on the whole cloaking debate. Just take a look at the back and forth in our Search Engine Watch Forums thread!

So where does that leave me? Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com are all disappointing right now. Tomorrow? Well, I can always hope for a better tomorrow. Who knows, maybe a new Google will come along? Maybe AltaVista will rise up again?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:25 AM | Permalink

Threadwatch reveals some more examples of issues Google is having. They note a search on queer forum returns CraigsList 97 times out of the top 100 results. That is not all, a search on wedding forum returns about 50 of 100 results from CraigsList's site, just scroll down to number 50 and you will see.

Is CraigsList spamming? No! Is Google suffering? :) Google is clearly having issues with sub sub domains. Continued coverage of Google's public index issues.

Postscript From Danny: Comments at Threadwatch also note Yahoo has the same issue. MSN does not as badly (but that could be the result of spidering fewer pages) and Ask looks very good.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:19 AM | Permalink

June 15, 2006

"MSN Hiring People to Hand Code SERPS" at SEO Blackhat is a nice catch from the MSN Search jobs page talking about needing people to help hand-craft results. Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped reacts with "Oh my." I react with "Hallelujah."

Note: As Threadwatch spots in comments, this page looks like a joke that MSN is hosting. Shame on me for not reading more closely -- type 150 words per minute! The page IS on the real MSN Search domain, but it's not linked from the real jobs area [OK, Pip at Google Blogoscoped found it connected from the jobs page]. Anyway, I'll drop a note and get confirmation. And the points below -- still valid :)

Let's look at the job post first:

When all else fails, and the ranking algorithms do not pass the confidence threshold, we fall back to delivering handcrafted results. Working on a team of approximately 132 other handcrafters in 26 worldwide markets, you will receive a user query, use all the available search engines to quickly scour the web for results, pick the top 10 results for this query, and send it on to the user. Successful handcrafters can typically find top 10 results for a real-time user?s query in less than 3.8 seconds. This is an opportunity to truly connect with customers, because the queries that get routed to you are precisely the ones that the engine cannot answer well. We will have adequate staffing to allow generous coffee and bathroom breaks. If you are an expert at using at least 3 different search engines, well versed with American English/colloquial usage, and can type at > 149 words/minute as measured by the Simia-Lico method ? come join us and delight users real-time!

I agree. Search engine algorithms are not perfect. I'm tired of seeing bad listings make it into the top results that any human reviewer would nix. The Google mantra has always been that they prefer to tailor their computer algorithms to figure out how a human would see and rate things and then get the algorithm to do the right thing. We've had that mantra for years. And yes, generally the algorithms do the right things. Still stuff gets through. So kill off the bad stuff with a human and sure, insert a good quality page you know you are missing.

As a reminder, MSN used to have human editors, as I've written before. That was actually one reason why years ago, they compared pretty well when we would do relevancy tests on popular queries. They had a very sophisticated editing suite that allowed a team of editors to constantly review -- AND FIX -- bad results.

Now I can buy into the "Oh My" idea if MSN is returning to hand crafted results because their automated technology is so bad they've got to fall back on humans. No, that's not good. But if it's to complement and better tune what the automation does? Bring it on. If you want more on the how and why this can help, see my past post, More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog.

I also have the "Oh My" reaction if hand handcrafting involves payment. This year, I've had one serious allegation that MSN has rigged one set of its results to favor a top advertiser. I just had another serious allegation like that levied against Yahoo. In the MSN case, the difficulty in pursuing the allegation is deciding whether they are true or an attempt to knock out a competitor that might be ranking well. In the Yahoo case, I'm awaiting that tipster to send me more information beyond the quick eye opening stuff I was shown at our recent London conference.

Yahoo, of course, does hand manipulate already, to my belief (I'm not saying for payment -- only that for whatever reason, they seem to hand craft some results). I wrote about this in 2004 but never got an answer about it from Yahoo, nor did I get an answer when I followed up at least one other time. It also came up on our forums last year and at here at Search Engine Roundtable.

Google has long denied "hand jobs," as wizened search marketers call them. Setting aside censorship cases, I believe that. I've never seen any solid evidence of results being hand selected by Google (and the quality raters we're written about before have not been shown to be manipulating results).

In fact, Google used to trumpet that it had no hand manipulation. That was true in crafting results, but it wasn't true in terms of removing them. As I wrote in 2004:

Of course, Google does indeed intervene manually in search results. It removes material because it may be deemed illegal, as was the case in the infamous chester guide search. The company also removes material in response to DMCA complaints and also because for spamming reasons, as this article explains further.

Such interventions make some marketers confused (or even livid) when they read Google's oft-repeated claims of no hand manipulation of search results. To them, such removals as I've described above are hand manipulation. You can get a flavor of such confusion in this recent WebmasterWorld forum thread.

These interventions are not specifically rank related. When they happen, Google doesn't try to reorder the ranking of how a page appears. Instead, it simply pulls the page from the index entirely. And if you aren't in the index, you naturally no longer rank number one. But to save confusion, it might be better for Google to be clearer in saying that they don't chose by hand which sites rank well.

By the way, I asked Google previously about the reference in a Wired article about wanting to "attach" better sites to queries to ensure it had good information available. I remember being disturbed by this, just as some in the aforementioned thread were, as it indeed suggested that Google was doing hand-ranking in some cases.

I was told by Google that this was a misinterpretation on the part of Wired. The Google engineer apparently meant that the Google search algorithm would be tweaked to produce better results, not that the results would be reordered by hand.

Overall, I'm fine with hand-crafting, hand manipulation, hand jobs or whatever you want to call it as long as:

It improves search quality
It's not done to favor an advertiser by rigging the editorial results

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:16 AM | Permalink

June 12, 2006

Microsoft describes the use of block level analysis to improve mobile browsing, writes of allowing searchers to customize search results, presents a query refinement system which provides concepts for users to choose from, and offers a look at a video browser for video search. IBM has filed a patent which could let a browser be used to exclude selected pages, and pages linked to or from those pages, from search engine results. In another filing, they detail how a focused random crawl could be used to gather statistical information on chosen topics.

Google further builds upon the use of predictive queries, in this instance to speed up searches, especially for people using wireless access to the web. Yahoo adds two more patent applications which use concept units derived from searchers' queries to index the web. In this case, the focus is upon how taxonomies could be created from those concepts.

Microsoft

Microsoft's Vision based Page Segmentation Algorithm (VIPS) was intended "to extract the semantic structure of a web page based on its visual presentation." We saw an example of how this could be used in a paper by Microsoft titled Block-level Link Analysis, where the location of a link on a page might tell us more about that link. The following patent uses VIPs to decide what to show searchers, when displaying a thumbnail of a result from a search.

Block importance analysis to enhance browsing of web page search results Invented by Xing Xie, Wei-Ying Ma, and Gengxin Miao Assigned to Micrsoft Corporation US Patent Application 20060123042 Publised June 8, 2006 Filed December 7, 2004

Abstract

How much control should a searcher have over what type of information appears on a search results page from a search engine? There really isn't much choice provided by the major search engines as to what searchers see. This patent application explores some options.

System and method for customization of search results Invented by Ramez Naam Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060122968 Published June 8, 2006 Filed December 2, 2004

Abstract

System and method for query refinement to enable improved searching based on identifying and utilizing popular concepts related to users' queries Invented by Raman Chandrasekar, James C. Finger, II, and Eric B. Watson Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060122991 Published June 8, 2006 Filed January 26, 2006

Abstract

System and method for video browsing using a cluster index Invented by Nebojsa Jojic and Sumit Basu Assigned to Microsoft US Patent Application 20060120624 Published June 8, 2006 Filed December 8, 2004

Abstract

IBM

Want to exclude certain pages or pages linked to or from that page from search results that you see in a search engine? The method described in the following document would enable a browser to help make that happen.

Administration of search results Invented by Susann Marie Keohane, Gerald Francis McBrearty, Shawn Patrick Mullen, Jessica Murillo, and Johnny Meng-Han Shieh Assigned to IBM US Patent Application 20060122972 Published June 8, 2006 Filed December 2, 2004

Abstract

Gathering information on a specific topic throughout the web could be helpful in many endeavors, including intelligence gathering and marketing research. A focused random crawl on a specific topic could gather information more quickly and inexpensively than a full crawl of the web.

System, method, and service for using a focused random walk to produce samples on a topic from a collection of hyper-linked pages Invented by Ziv Bar-Yossef, Tapas Kanungo, and Robert Krauthgamer Assigned to IBM US Patent Application 20060122998 Published June 8, 2006 Filed December 4, 2004

Abstract

Google

In recent months, Google has had patent applications published on the use of predictive queries in the context of making it easier to work with mobile devices, in applications like Google Suggest, and in a version of Google Suggest system for languages that don't use alphabetical characters. This next patent application talks about predictive queries primarily in the context of increasing the speed of returned results.

Predictive information retrieval Invented by Shumeet Baluja and Henry Rowley US Patent Application 20060122976 Published June 8, 2006 Filed December 3, 2004

Abstract

Yahoo

Yahoo is building a nice series of patents involving indexing on the basis of concept units. Last month, we looked at a newly granted patent from Yahoo involving the generation of concept units from search queries. As noted there, the patent is one of three filings that use the unit concept to help understand and index pages. A couple of newly published patent applications from Yahoo build upon the methods described in those documents to categorize concepts and build taxonomies of concepts.

Automatic generation of taxonomies for categorizing queries and search query processing using taxonomies Invented by Shyam Kapur, Jignashu Parikh, and Deepa Joshi Assigned to Yahoo US Patent Application 20060122994 Published June 8, 2006 Filed December 6, 2004

Abstract

Search processing with automatic categorization of queries Invented by Shyam Kapur, Jignashu Parikh, and Deepa Joshi Assigned to Yahoo US Patent Application 20060122979 Published June 8, 2006 Filed December 6, 2004

Abstract

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 12:47 AM | Permalink

May 31, 2006

Marketwatch, reporting from the D4 conference, quotes Bill Gates discussing Google as "very much the leader" contrary to Microsoft having made previous grand statements about matching Google within 6-months far longer ago. Bill Gates announced "it's a five year battle." The plan is to get users to navigate to Microsoft search rather than Google.

Microsoft has invested heavily in search, and search (among other Web services) will see an increase of $2 billion more in investment over the next year than what was initially planned. And when it all comes together, the plan is to spend on advertising to let people know. Their investment in advertising to date hasn't led to much of a market shift yet.

Postscript From Danny: Microsoft, of course, has indeed already spent heavily to promote its search service, such after MSN Search launched with Microsoft's own technology or with a recent online game promotion. But perhaps Gates means that Windows Live Search won't get the same treatment until they feel the quality has improved.

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 9:49 AM | Permalink

May 25, 2006

New patents from this week from Yahoo on indexing by concepts and on uses of scripts on different computers to share data between them. Microsoft looks at reranking search results based upon redundancy, annotations on web pages, and showing web ads based upon a person's television viewing habits. IBM comes up with smarter bookmarks, and Amazon shows smarter search results when a first query doesn't quite work.

Yahoo

This first patent from Yahoo is part of a trilogy of related patent filings. The other two haven't been granted yet:

Systems and methods for search processing using superunits

Universal search interface systems and methods

It's interesting to see how these three fit together into a search system. Co-occurrence seems to play a large role under this system.

Systems and methods for generating concept units from search queries Inventors: Shyam Kapur and Deepa Joshi US Patent 7,051,023 Granted May 23, 2006 Filed: November 12, 2003

Abstract

Method and system for enabling a script on a first computer to communicate and exchange data with a script on a second computer over a network Inventors: Thomas Joshua Shafron and Christopher Staib US Patent 7,051,119 Granted May 23, 2006 Filed: July 12, 2001

Abstract

Microsoft

This first patent aims at identifying and filtering documents that contain roughly the same information, and identifying and filtering off-topic information, in search results.

Utilizing information redundancy to improve text searches Inventors: Eric D. Brill and Susan T. Dumais US Patent 7,051,014 Granted May 23, 2006 Filed: June 18, 2003

Abstract

Scalable computing system for managing annotations Inventors: Scott C. Cottrille, Yoram Yaacovi, and Antony Halim US Patent 7,051,274 Granted May 23, 2006 Filed: June 24, 1999

Abstract

System and method of inserting advertisements into an information retrieval system display Inventors: Phillip Y. Goldman, Michael A. Killianey, and Daniel J. Zigmond; US Patent 7,051,351 Granted May 23, 2006 Filed: March 8, 1999

Abstract

IBM

Smart bookmarks Inventors: Jason R. McGee, Christopher C. Mitchell, Michael John Morton, and Brent A. Peters US Patent 7,051,117 Granted May 23, 2006 Filed: July 25, 2002

Abstract

Amazon

When someone performs a search, there are sometimes no results that satisfy that query. This can happen when the query terms are very detailed and narrow, or when one of the terms in the query is misspelled or misremembered. Instead of frustrating the searcher by not returning any responses at all, search engines will often display results based upon some of the terms that were in the query, instead of all of them.

The following patent notes that a common approach to displaying these results with less than all of the terms is to arbitrarily remove some of the terms from the query, until a number of results are returned. The aim of the process in this document is to provide a more effective technique for displaying items relating to some of the terms in the query.

Identifying items relevant to a current query based on items accessed in connection with similar queries Inventors: Dwayne Bowman, Greg Linden, Ruben E. Ortega, and Joel R. Spiegel US Patent 7,050,992 Granted May 23, 2006 Filed: June 25, 1999

Abstract

The present invention provides a software facility for identifying the items most relevant to a current query based on items selected in connection with similar queries. In preferred embodiments of the invention, the facility receives a query specifying one or more query terms. In response, the facility generates a query result identifying a plurality of items that satisfy the query. The facility then produces a ranking value for at least a portion of the item identified in the query result by combining the relative frequencies with which users selected that item from the query results generated from queries specifying each of the terms specified by the query. The facility identifies as most relevant those items having the highest ranking values.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 9:22 PM | Permalink

May 22, 2006

Huge props to MSN Search for enabling Webmasters to tell MSN not to display a site's ODP directory title in the MSN Search results. Basically, some times when a site is listed in MSN Search results, they use the ODP (dmoz.org) directory listing's data, specifically the title and description from the ODP database. Now, MSN allows Webmasters to specify if that data should be used or not.

How do you implement it?

Place one of these tags with the other meta tags on your page.

Keep in mind, it may take a few weeks for MSN to notice this tag in your pages.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:14 PM | Permalink

May 4, 2006

TMCnet.com has an interesting article explaining two new projects Microsoft is working on in relation to MSN Search. The first is something named "Wild Thing" that enables short hand searching. It was first designed for mobile Web searching, to allow users to type short hand, but now if you don't know how to spell "Schwarzenegger" you can type "ar* sc*w mo*" into the engine and it will try to figure it out. The second is something named "Nocturnal" and this shares bookmarks and Web browsing activity with your MSN Messenger buddies. Nocturnal can also be used to learn your Web behavior and tailor search results specifically for you.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 3:16 PM | Permalink

May 3, 2006

With Google quiet, a recent flurry of activity burst out at the US Patent and Trademark Office from Microsoft and IBM, including the granting of a patent on a music search engine, another on searching recorded voice, and patents (and patent applications) on the ranking and presentation of results and on refinements of queries.

The strong showing from the two companies is joined by a Yahoo patent on pay-for-placement bidding, a Doubleclick patent on media ads, a patent application from Harris Corporation on reranking results based upon vocabulary words, patent applications from Yahoo and A9 adding functionality to handheld devices, Copernic trying to claim a process for real time indexing on desktops, and Telstra patenting a clustering and machine learning search system.

Yahoo

Yahoo was granted a patent on pay-for-placement bidding under the Overture name and also published a patent application on sharing data, such as driving directions, from a computer to a handheld device.

System and method for enabling multi-element bidding for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine US Patent 7,035,812, assigned to Overture, invented by Ted Meisel, Peter Savich, Thomas A. Soulanille (Granted April 25, 2006, Filed on February 1, 2002)

Abstract

Method for providing a clip for viewing at a remote device US Patent Application 20060085731, assigned to Yahoo, invented by Yingqing L. Cui, Min Zhou, and Zhaowei Jiang (Published April 20, 2006, Filed on September 28, 2004)

Abstract

A9.com

A9 claimed a way to display images, such as destinations, to mobile devices in response to the location of those devices - useful when you are following directions and want to see your stopping point as you approach it.

System and method for displaying location-specific images on a mobile device US Patent Application 20060089792, assigned to A9.com, Inc.invented by Udi Manber, Barnaby M. Dorfman, and Jonathan A. Gold (Published April 27, 2006, Filed on October 25, 2004)

Abstract

IBM

IBM has a handful of new filings at the USTPO, including; a way to search recorded speech, a method to predict search result quality in response to different queries, an icon based user interface allowing searchers to choose amongst categories of search results, and an identification system to see previously visited pages in search results that may not have merited bookmarking earlier.

Method and system for searching recorded speech and retrieving relevant segments US Patent 7,039,585, assigned to IBM, invented by Gerald Johann Wilmot and Robert Kern (Granted May 2, 2006, Filed on September 24, 2001)

Abstract

Prediction of query difficulty for a generic search engine US Patent Application 20060085399, assigned to IBM, invented by David Carmel, Lawrence Adam Darlow, Shai Fine, and Elad Yom-Tov (Published April 20, 2006, Filed on October 19, 2004)

Abstract

Dynamic search criteria on a search graph US Patent Application 20060085395, assigned to IBM, invented by Connie M. Cradick, Ryan Kirk Cradick, Zachary Adam Garbow, and Emuejevoke Jane-Frances Sanomi-Fleming (Published April 20, 2006, Filed on October 14, 2004)

Abstract

Method and System to Identify a Previously Visited Universal Resource Located (URL) in Results from a Search US Patent Application 20060085476, assigned to IBM, invented by Fonda J. Daniels, Timothy E. Figgins, and David B. Kumhyr (Published April 20, 2006, Filed on October 15, 2004)

Abstract

Microsoft

As I noted above, Microsoft has been keeping the patent office busy, with a number of new documents involving the web and search. One involves a quick way to change the scoring criteria used to rank sites, or classes of sites, for presentation in search results. Another allows for tracking and storing information about visits by a browser across different content sites.

Microsoft has also developed a music search engine based upon the characteristics of the compositions themselves instead of subjective descriptions of the songs and collaborative filtering (i.e., listeners who bought this album also purchased...). Another patent enables searching of data from partner sites via a main search interface. An improved method of providing thumbnails of web pages for users of handheld is the focus of another granted filing.

A different one looks to serving ads and other location based content, based not only upon the location of searchers, but also on the intended location of their searches. Query refinements are described in another, which uses metadata about documents initially returned on a search to try to interpret the intent of a query and provide relevant results.

The last Microsoft patent application listed involves a browser enhancement to aid in navigation through web pages, based upon predictions of where a visitor might want to go next. (I guess helping to answer the old Microsoft question, "Where do you want to go today?")

System and method for providing search results with configurable scoring formula US Patent 7,039,631, assigned to Microsoft, invented by James Charles Finger, II (Granted May 2, 2006, Filed on May 24, 2002)

Abstract

Tracking usage behavior in computer systems US Patent 7,039,699, assigned to Microsoft, invented by Attila Narin, Keith A. Kegley, and David A. Sobeski (Granted May 2, 2006, Filed on May 2, 2000)

Abstract

System and methods for providing adaptive media property classification US Patent 7,035,873, assigned to Microsoft, invented by Christopher B. Weare (Granted April 25, 2006, Filed on August 20, 2001)

Abstract

Generic proxy for representing search engine partner US Patent 7,035,845, assigned to Microsoft, invented by Steven Yao, Eric Watson, Saurab Nog, and David Snelling (Granted April 25, 2006, Filed on May 15, 2002)

Abstract

Semantic thumbnails US Patent Application 20060085743, assigned to Microsoft, invented by Patrick Markus Baudisch and Heidi Lap Mun Lam (Published April 20, 2006, Filed on October 18, 2004)

Abstract

System and method for automatic generation of search results based on local intention US Patent Application 20060085392, assigned to Microsoft, invented by Lee Wang and Ying Li (Published April 20, 2006, Filed on September 30, 2004)

Abstract

Automatic query suggestions US Patent Application 20060085391, assigned to Microsoft, invented by Andrzej Turski, Lili Cheng, and Matthew B. MacLaurin (Published April 20, 2006, Filed on September 24, 2004)

Abstract

Browsing web content using predictive navigation links US Patent Application 20060085766, assigned to Microsoft, invented by Ewa Dominowska and Robert J. Ragno (Published April 20, 2006, Filed on October 15, 2004)

Abstract

Doubleclick

Doubleclick was awarded a patent on predicting, displaying, monitoring, and receiving feedback on direct advertisements, preferably banner ads on media sites.

Method and apparatus for automatic placement of advertising US Patent 7,039,599, Assigned to Doubleclick Inc., invented by Dwight A. Merriman and Kevin O'Connor (Granted May 2, 2006, Filed on June 15, 1998)

Abstract

Harris Corporation

Harris Corporation has patented a method of reranking search results by the occurence of relevant vocabulary words within the documents returned. Those relevant terms could be decided upon the the searcher or the computing system used.

Method for re-ranking documents retrieved from a document database US Patent Application 20060089926, assigned to Harris Corporation, invented by Margaret M. Knepper, Kevin Lee Fox, and Ophir Frieder (Published April 27, 2006, Filed on October 27, 2004)

Abstract

Copernic Technologies

Copernic Technologies has claimed a method of desktop search which works with an operating system to identify which documents and which parts of a local index need to be updated, rather than reindexing all documents on a system.

Indexing systems and methods US Patent Application 20060085490, assigned to Copernic Technologies, Inc., invented by Mathieu Baron, Daniel Lavoie, and Nicholas Pelletier (Published April 20, 2006, Filed on August 19, 2005)

Abstract

Telstra Corporation Limited

A patent was granted to a couple of employees of Telstra Corporation Limited, in Australia, which has a similar name and shares inventors and a filing date with an Australian patent filing assigned to the company. It describes a process of filtering and categorizing documents and the use of a support vector machine learning approach, for large quantities of text messages, emails, and web pages.

While there is no official assignment noted in the USPTO database, there is a patent application assigned to Telstra, filed on the same date as the application in the US, with the same inventors under the name "A document categorisation system" (Australian Application Number 2001291494)

Document categorisation system US Patent Application 20060089924, invented by Bhavani Raskutti and Adam Kowalczyk (Published on April 27, 2006, Filed on September 25, 2001)

Abstract

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 6:56 PM | Permalink

I was talking with Kevin Delaney of the Wall Street Journal on Monday about search things in general and mentioned the sense it makes for Microsoft and Yahoo to get together. Microsoft is behind with the core search technology. Yahoo's been struggling to upgrade its paid search service. Let's get these two kids together! And today in the Wall Street Journal, it turns out that there's apparently a faction at Microsoft that wants to do just that.

Via Paid Content, A Microsoft, Yahoo Tie-Up? from the Wall Street Journal has the details. Kevin and colleague Robert Guth write of there being two factions within Microsoft -- the "let's built it ourselves" group that has been in control so far and the "let's acquire" group apparently led by Microsoft senior vice president Hank Vigil.

Vigil is said to have led the failed negotiations to combine MSN with AOL. Frankly, a Yahoo deal makes more sense than that. AOL would have provided existing traffic but not solid search technology. Yahoo provides plenty of traffic, along with core search technology and a healthy, first-hand advertiser base.

What's not to love? Probably the high price of the acquisition, plus whether Yahoo -- especially cofounder Jerry Yang -- would go for it. But apparently it's plausible enough that both companies have talked informally over the past year.

The Wall Street Journal cites the hiring of Steve Berkowitz by Microsoft as perhaps being a tipping point. I'd certainly agree. Steve is the first serious outside person Microsoft has brought in for its battle in the search wars. Bringing him on was a big sign that what Microsoft has been trying to do internally hasn't been working -- and so something radical such as an Ask or Yahoo acquisition might be in order.

The big downside is that such an acquisition would give Microsoft yet another brand to confuse consumers with. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to push MSN, they've now shifted things behind making the stupid Windows Live brand their flagship. It's stupid for so many reasons. Let me bullet point two major ones:

Most people I know don't really like the Windows brand. Heck, I'm a Windows person, fairly anti-Mac, but Windows still represents crashes and glitches to me. And this is the label you want to attach to your online services?
We're moving into a world where the operating system and my web-based services aren't necessarily connected. I love Outlook. I live in Outlook. But online, I might want to sync Outlook with Yahoo or Google's calendar. Forcing me to think -- overtly or indirectly through branding -- that I have to use all your products makes me want to use none of them. Let MSN operate as if it wasn't linked to your operating system or your browser and it will be a stronger service in the long run, not weaker.

So Microsoft's already coping with the confusion of two major brands. Adding in Yahoo further confuses matters, unless they perhaps make a brave, bold move and put everything behind the brand leader in the space, Yahoo.

Meanwhile, via Valleywag, Ballmer defends Microsoft's spending increase from the Seattle Times covers a likely leaked memo from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer naming Google as one of the company's chief competitors and requiring further "heavy investments" in search. The goal, which we've heard before, is to create "the web's largest advertising network, giving us an engine that twill enable us to monetize our services and compete against Google."

Ah -- but to compete against Google, you don't need an advertising network. You first need a quality core web search engine, which your heavy investment to date has failed to create. And so back to Yahoo, which has exactly what Microsoft needs, that core technology.

Microsoft's AdCenter May Fail to Topple Google From Dominance from Bloomberg covers how advertisers are getting a more formal look at the MSN adCenter service that Microsoft has rolled out over the past few months. Unlike Microsoft's failure in web search, I'd say adCenter is a big success. The service already has plenty of advertisers using it -- and anecdotally continues to draw lots of praise for its features.

Features ultimately mean little, of course. As the story cites, it's about volume. MSN could have rolled out a terrible product that advertisers would have coped with simply because it was the only way to reach MSN's substantial traffic. But to the company's credit, they did not do that. Instead, they've continued to refine and tweak and take advertiser feedback in a way that has earned them raves I rarely hear recently about the systems at Google or Yahoo. Volume remains key, but the features and wooing still certainly help.

And that brings us back to Yahoo, which has been struggling with an antiquated paid listings toolset. The Counterattack On Google from BusinessWeek covers how Yahoo's "Panama" update to its paid listings system has been progressing over the past two years and is nearing completion. But BusinessWeek correctly summarizes, in my view, the changes are more about bringing Yahoo up to Google's level of features rather than leapfrogging past Google and into features like MSN offers.

It's another argument that makes the idea of Yahoo and Microsoft getting together not wacky at all.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Yahoo & Microsoft To Combine.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:00 AM | Permalink

April 26, 2006

Nathan Weinberg points to a blog that has documented Windows Live testing a feature that enables the searcher to search within a site, from the search results page. What this means is that you search on a keyword at live.com, you are presented with search results. Under each of the results, you are presented with a sub-search box. If you enter in a keyword phrase into that sub-search box, you will be limiting your search, to only show results from within that site (a site command search). I personally do not see it, and I wonder if it searches the whole domain name, or limits it also to a subdomain site search.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:02 AM | Permalink

April 14, 2006

Via Threadwatch, Microsoft Gets Social from BusinessWeek has news that Microsoft may be buying or partnering with Eurekster to bring social search features to its MSN Window Live Search service. An question answering service is also coming.

What's MSN Windows Live Search, by the way? Since Microsoft doesn't seem to know if we're supposed to use Windows Live Search (launched last month) or MSN Search (launched in 1998), MSN Windows Live Search is my name for covering both bases at once. Personally, I like how it preserves the MSN brand while adding yet another word to the search service's name. It rolls off the tongue. I'm going to go MSNWindowsLiveSearch someone or something right now.

BusinessWeek confuses the forthcoming Q&A tool with social search. Those are two completely different types of search features/services, of which Q&A is the least important. In fact, it just reeks of another "me too" move that's not going to budge MSN Windows Live Search's usage among searchers.

I mean, LookSmart Live never took off after being launched in 1999. Neither did Ask's Answer Point, which came out in 2000. Google Answers, which was kicked off in 2002 the same week Answer Point closed only generated 0.01 percent of Google visits in November. Yahoo Answers was launched only in December, so perhaps it will grow. But it probably won't. Wondir is still going, but it's hardly had the growth and notice of some social sites like YouTube.

Real social/personalized search coming to MSNWLS is much more important, because it really is something I expect will take us into that next generational jump. Eurekster certainly has plenty of experience in the space, having ushered in the current round of social search attention since it launched back in 2004.

Here are some key stories from me on social and personalized search, if you really want to come up to speed on changes:

FYI, this will be MSN's second time around with a social search feature. In 1999, they carried Direct Hit results, which was a rudimentary form of social search based on tracking aggregate clicks. Direct Hit results were dropped sometime before 2002.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:10 AM | Permalink

April 13, 2006

What? You didn't make the European Conference on Information Retrieval in London this week? Don't fret. Xan Porter did and has a rundown here, with one interesting paper from Microsoft Research on how key terms appearing in a URL can be used to predict if a page has a good answer. It's something MSN plans test more on "real" web data from MSN in the future. I suspect the method might not be so useful then. Indeed, MSN Search's quality already seems to struggle with the old school search engine method of favoring URLs with search terms in them, an easy thing to manipulate. I can't find a free link to the actual paper. If one turns up, we'll postscript.

Postscript: Reader Dean Rowan writes that you'll find the Microsoft paper here (PDF format). However, it's only accessible to those with SpringerLink subscriptions.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:30 AM | Permalink

April 6, 2006

Uh oh. MSN Search is dead at Threadwatch covers MSN Search being down. Nearly three hours later, I checked and got the home page, but trying a search gave me this error message:

This service is currently unavailable

Our team is working to restore service as quickly as possible. Please try your request again later.

No news on the MSN Search Weblog about what's going on. Will postscript here if I hear more. See, these things don't happen with 32 bit systems. Actually, Google's had a few outages, but nothing this long and usually due to outside factors. Some background on those examples is covered here.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, MSN Search Goes Down.

Postscript by Barry: The Wall Street Journal has word from MSN with the following; A Microsoft spokesman said the outage began at about 8 a.m. Pacific time. At noon, the service was still down, but shortly afterward began working again. The spokesman said company technicians have been working on the problem, but have not yet concluded what caused the shutdown in the first place. The Seattle PI also has some details here with the statement.

Postscript by Barry: MSN Search blog has posted a statement on Friday, April 7th. They first apologized and then said that they have "disabled the speller function" for the time being. So, one would assume the speller function has something to do with the outage.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:57 PM | Permalink

April 5, 2006

Bill Slawski has an excellent write up on web spam through the eyes of patent applications and published papers. During Bill's research, he found PageTurner by Microsoft, which not only looks at how to establish a crawl frequency of specific Web pages, but also identifies "duplicate and near duplicate content on web pages." From one of the papers Bill referenced in the post, he notes the usage of the words "crafty porn." That leads him to a patent application we referenced last week named content evaluation by Microsoft. Anyway, Bill really digs deep into these algorithms and patent applications with links and abstracts pulled of content and video presentations. Read the full blog entry entitled Fighting web spam with algorithms.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:09 AM | Permalink

March 29, 2006

The MSN Search Blog last night announced that they have released a new search feature named "Search Macros." Search Macros are methods of building an advanced search query and saving that query for later in your search bar. The example the blog uses is searching for recipes. They provide a link to a pre-built macro named livesearch.recipes, which uses the follow advanced query;

(-site:toeatgoodfood.com -linkdomain:googlesyndication.com intitle:recipe prefer:cup prefer:serve prefer:cook prefer:food prefer:menu prefer:cookbook prefer:site:www.epicurious.com prefer:site:www.recipesource.com prefer:site:allrecipes.com prefer:site:www.foodtv.com prefer:site:www.recipesource.com)

This combination of advanced query strings allows you to exclude certain sites, look for certain page characteristics and also give preference to other sites. You can then click install this macro and the Macro Search will be saved to your search bar. You can also create your own Macros, for more information visit the MSN Search blog.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:44 AM | Permalink

March 17, 2006

Rand Fishkin explores the MSN Search link operator. With this advanced search command, you can find out who links to Matt Cutts, SEO Book, SEO Consultants, but not SEOmoz.org; (linkdomain:mattcutts.com linkdomain:seobook.com linkdomain:seoconsultants.com) (-linkdomain:seomoz.org). This is pretty powerful stuff, check out SEOMoz.org for more information on this.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:47 AM | Permalink

March 8, 2006

Microsoft has seen the future, and is moving just about everything it does online into a suite of services called Windows Live. Today, Microsoft launched a beta version of Windows Live Search, a new service that's designed, at least for now, to complement MSN search. More about Microsoft's new offering in today's SearchDay article, Microsoft Launches Windows Live Search Beta.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Microsoft's Windows Live Search Opens; Bye-Bye MSN Search?

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:02 AM | Permalink

February 16, 2006

MSN Search now sports a new look, as a precursor to branding it as Windows Live. ABC News has more on the rebranding move. InfoWorld reports here that the formal rebranding to happen before the end of June. Meanwhile, Todd Friesen finds better clustering is needed with the latest rendition, while Greg Boser finds Firefox issues. Forum discussions covered here at Search Engine Roundtable.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:35 AM | Permalink

January 26, 2006

Just weeks after announcing the formation of the Microsoft adLab, the company is announcing two new research labs, Microsoft Live Labs (MLL) and Search Labs.

MLL will bring together researchers from MSN and Microsoft Research and will be led by Dr. Gary Flake, a technical fellow at Microsoft. Dr. Flake came to Microsoft last year. Before moving to Redmond he was the person in charge of Yahoo Research where I had the opportunity to interview him in 2004.

Microsoft Live Labs will focus on, "Internet-centric applied research programs including: rapidly prototyping and launching emerging technologies, incubating entirely new inventions, and improving and accelerating Windows Live offerings."

A list of some of the Windows Live current projects can be reviewed here. Projects include everything from the Live.com home page to Windows Live Local (directory, maps and "birds eye" magery) to the soon to launch Windows Live Expo (classified ad/social marketplace).

Ray Ozzie, Craig Mundie and David Vaskevitch, Microsoft Corp's chief technical officers, will all serve as the Live Labs Advisory Board.

From the announcement: Live Labs will investigate a broad and comprehensive set of research topics such as multimedia search, machine learning, distributed computing, data mining, as well as engage in rapid prototyping, and the incubation of disruptive technologies. Unlike basic research, which is geared toward visionary discoveries that may or may not end up in actual products, and product development, which is very feature focused and geared toward solving tactical engineering problems, Live Labs applied research will study the relationship and applicability of theories or principles to the solution of a problem, or an actual product or service.

Search Labs In addition to Microsoft Live Labs, the company is also announcing another new lab, Search Labs (SL), that will have a presence at both MS headquarters in Redmond and the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View, CA. SL work closely with Microsoft Live Labs.

Search Labs will be run by new MS hire, Ashok Chandra, a former VP at Verity. SL will focus on personalization and socialization and also build datamining, verticals, and parametric capabilities, "to go beyond the search bar experience."

The press release has more including info about grants, fellowships and sabbaticals for members of the academic community.

Finally, Dr. Flake has published "Live Labs - a Manifesto" that offers details on the vision, mission, philosophy, and structure of the Live Labs. In the vision section of the manifesto Flake writes: This is not Web 2.0. It's World 2.0.

Learn more from the MS Live Labs web site.

Postscript: Ina Fried has more info in this News.com story.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:04 AM | Permalink

January 10, 2006

Barry reports that MSN Search allows searchers an option to limit their search to a specific IP address. Example here. Actually, a bit of research points out that this IP search option went live around midyear 2005. Nevertheless, it's good that SER reminds of us of it.

MSN Search isn't the only web engine to offer an IP search option. Gigablast also offers this feature. It's documented here with an example.

Web search historians remember that AllTheWeb used to offer an IP search limit. It disappeared in 2004 when ATW moved to the Yahoo search platform.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:56 AM | Permalink

January 5, 2006

In a just posted interview with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Ina Fried and Michael Kanellos from News.com sit down with both MS execs and talk about a number of topics including search, Google, etc. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit from this interview is that one year ago (to the day) it was Gates who said, "today search is nothing." In this new interview he told News.com that, "search is bad today."

Danny also mentions this comment in his post directly below this one.

Here are a few highlights from the just posted News.com interview.

On Software Ballmer sees upstarts and "the Googles" offering "ad-funded versions" of software that MS has traditionally sold.

Bill Gates on Ad-Supported Software Is it a better competitor once they stick ads in? That's the thing that's so goofy I don't get it. Actually, that was one of the few announcements in our industry that was sort of a fraud that actually was unmasked by the press; the first ever was that Sun-Google thing where people were saying, well, what the hell is this?

On Google Ballmer says: What's the expression, to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail? If you know how to sell advertising, everything is going to look like an advertising problem. I think people like to say the same thing about us.

Ballmer adds that MS already has a one billion dollar a year ad business and they will grow the "hell" out of it. They will also grow their packaged business and have a big subscriptions business.

Ballmer: So we need to have all three muscles or we are vulnerable, but nobody else is even trying to have all three muscles. On Growing Advertising Ballmer tells Fried and Kanellos that it will take awhile. First of all, advertising isn't all about search. Search is a good vehicle for advertising, but there are other good vehicles for advertising. We basically have held share over the last couple of years. Some other guys have gained a little share, but we've basically been relatively flat on share and growing nicely with the market. How do you grow? You have exciting experiences that people want to participate in, whether those are communication or search or content.

On Search Gates joins in and says that search is bad today. He said something similar to this a year ago. More personalization is needed. Ballmer adds that half of the searches don't give you an answer you want.

Gates on Search Well, search is bad today. The average search takes five minutes. It doesn't really understand what's local versus what's not local. You know, you type in "pizza" it's going to tell you about someplace 1,000 miles away. It doesn't understand the context of are you trying to get advice for using the product or buying a product, are you an expert, do you want the historical data, do you want the most recent data, all of these things that can be done. And so search is not personalized right now, and we've been making some advances. We've been driving our relevance up and up and up, and we have this way of really slotting in third-party expertise and letting you do some programmatic things against search.

Postscript: Gates also had plenty to say about Google in this September 2005 interview where he also mentions the Google "honeymoon" period that Danny also blogged about. He says: You do me-too Google Talk, and it's a big deal. But we had our honeymoon phase, and it was fun from maybe 1985 to 1995. And we've had lots of competitors in their honeymoon phase. But I'd say, in some ways, this is the biggest honeymoon I've ever seen.

Postscript: For more comments from Mr. Gates, see this Reuters article: Gates sees IBM, not Google, as top Microsoft rival.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:03 PM | Permalink

December 2, 2005

Via Threadwatch (and its new man in charge, Aaron Wall), word that MSN Search is also using quality raters to revew and rate results.

We've posted in the past about quality raters at Google and Yahoo in these and other posts: + Google Looking for Spanish Language Quality Raters + Google Rater Hub - Details Of Human Review System Unveiled + Interested in Evaluating Search Quality and Advertising for Google? + Want to Be a Relevance Analyst? This post talks about similar types of reviewer positions at Yahoo.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:11 PM | Permalink

November 25, 2005

In an interview with Information Week, Bill Gates talks about Microsoft Research and speaks briefly about search and of course mentions a competitor that begins with the letter "G". Gates says that coming soon MSN will have "more than matched" Google in terms relevance. Here's the full passage:

Gates says: Search is an amazing example where we relied somewhat on an outside company, Inktomi, which Yahoo bought, then decided to build our own search effort essentially from scratch. Now, in a very short period of time, we will actually have more than matched the kind of relevance that Google can deliver. The role of Microsoft Research in that has been phenomenal.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:34 AM | Permalink

November 21, 2005

Two brief items from the UK search scene today.

+ Revolution Magazine reports that MSN Search (MSN.co.uk) will power web search on the Times of London web site.

+ The Netipmerative article: Ask scales back UK paid search ads, reports that Ask UK has done what we saw Jeeves.com do a few months ago and cut back on the number of ads on web results pages.

According to the company, Ask.co.uk will remove Branded Response and Answerlink ad products from the site as of December 31st.

The article also notes that Ask.co.uk has postponed its plans to offer their Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings in the UK.

Finally, Ask.co.uk is planning a "phased reduction" of their UK sales force between now and the end of the year.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:15 PM | Permalink

October 22, 2005

Over on Channel 9, Scoble has posted a one-hour video "frank" talk about search with Andy Edmonds and Erik Selberg* from the MSN Search team.

Scoble writes: They talk about how the engine works, and what they're doing to beat the competition. Watch me give them a bit of heck about being behind the other major engines.

*For those of you who are web search "historians," Selberg was one of the original developers (with Oren Etzioni) of MetaCrawler at the University of Washington about 10 years ago. More about MetaCrawler here.

Postscript: On a somewhat unrelated note, I noticed that Microsoft's Web Search and Data Mining team in Silicon Valley now has a web page. It lists several of their projects along with lots of papers to read. More? Here are the pages for similar teams in Redmond and Asia.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:06 PM | Permalink

October 12, 2005

What to Take Away from MSN's Responses from SEOmoz zooms in on the Community Questions to the MSN Web Search Team article that I think was posted there a few weeks ago. Both are good reads with high-level details on how MSN Search indexes and ranks documents.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:47 AM | Permalink

September 29, 2005

Google 302 and MSN from Dave Naylor is chock full of badness on the parts of both Google and MSN, showing how Google redirections are causing it to hijack listings in MSN's search results. Dave gives you the short rundown. Here's the spelled out version, and thanks for his help in assembling it.

Look at this search result at MSN UK for batman animated bean bag.
See how the first result is for this page at Kids UK?
Now look at the URL MSN UK lists for that page: http://groups.google.co.uk/froogle_url?q= http://www.kidsuk.co.uk/shop/catalog/ Batman-Bedding-p-1-c-1288.html %3Fsource%3Dfroogle&fr=AJrr2tQq23-_SJjef Mma5wwNUyhA6FBUGEdlEBymj9jJAAAAAAAAAAA
See the bold part? That shows that MSN believes this page is hosted at groups.google.co.uk.
What's happening is over at Froogle UK, all links you click on there are redirected out of Google and to the destination sites, but...
Google is using 302 temporary redirection, which is causing MSN to let it "hijack" these listings.
To be clear, MSN is NOT listing a Google page, even though the page has a Google URL. Look at the cached copy of that page, and you can see that it is the same page as at Kids UK. But Google has control over the URL in MSN's results.
In other words, should Google lose its mind, it could at any point send MSN a cloaked version of the Kids UK page and likely maintain the ranking while showing human visitors something else entirely. Kids UK is not in control of that listing on MSN, even though it currently leads to the Kids UK site. It's been hijacked by Google! If Google were using a 301 redirection, however, this shouldn't be happening.
Side point. If this is a Froogle UK thing, why does that URL say GROUPS.google.co.uk? Google UK has some domain madness going on. Visit the home page. Click the Froogle link to get this page. Now click the Groups link to reach this page. Notice now how even though you are in Google Groups, the the froogle.co.uk domain is what shows in your address bar. That shouldn't be happening. Other mix-ups like this are leading to the confusion.
Hey! What's MSN doing crawling Froogle anyway? The robots.txt file there should be keeping it out, right? Sure. But if some site has made copies of Froogle results, scraped the content as fodder for a fake blog or something else to attract traffic, MSN might crawl that and thus see the Froogle redirections.

Overall, a nice demonstration of why MSN needs to consider how it handles redirection. My Revisiting Hijacking & Redirects: Moving To A Solution story gives you more background on the hijacking situation as it especially has impacted Google.

I also wrote that story as a lead in for our Indexing Summit 2 session as SES San Jose that was held last month, to see if we could get a standard solution to handing redirection and eliminate these type of problems. I was planning to finally write up what happened at that session next week, and I still will, promise. But here's the summary:

Yahoo: We have a solution (as described in my article) that seems to work.
Google: Matt Cutts wants to use the Yahoo solution but the engineer overseeing how redirections are handled says they've solved it another way. Matt said if you still see it happening, report it to Google, and then he's got some ammunition to say "I told you so" and get the Yahoo solution going. It's been reported at least once already. Bacon polenta on Matt's blog explains that and more important, gives updated instructions on how to report a hijacking in Google's listings.
Ask Jeeves: Thinks it has a handle on the situation and doesn't need to follow the Yahoo solution.
MSN: Didn't take part in the summit.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Google Hijacks Batman Room Decor Listing At MSN!

Postscript: I was incorrect on the robots.txt banning. The robots.txt file for Google Groups wouldn't have prevented MSN from crawling Froogle results that can be accessed under that domain. More in the forum thread above.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:42 PM | Permalink

If you're a Firefox user who wants to have easier access to the MSN Search database, a post on MSN Search's WebLog points out that a new MSN Search "Mycroft" search plugin for Firefox is now available. Actually, a number of MSN Search plugins are available for various versions of the MSN database.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:11 PM | Permalink

September 23, 2005

Researchers might be interested to learn that MSN Search is offering a free access to the full text (not just blurbs) of Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia. This page offers details about how to get a free pass. No, registration is required.

Basically, when you click on a link to Encarta found on MSN Search results pages or in an MSN "direct answer," you're given a two hour free pass (set via a cookie) to the full text of the entire encyclopedia. Once your pass is activated, you can search and access the full text using Encarta search box. OK, your two hour pass has expired and you still want more. No problem! Simply return to MSN Search and click another Encarta link and your free pass is renewed.

* Exceptions: The Encarta free pass does not include access to homework tools, literature guides, and sidebars. Also, with your free pass, you can view thumbnails of MSN Encarta illustrations, photographs, audio, and video but not full-size images.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:01 PM | Permalink

September 8, 2005

Phil Bradley points to this research paper, The Freshness Of Web Search Engines' Databases (PDF), out of Heinrich-Heine-University in Dusseldorf that analyzed the freshness of Google, Yahoo and MSN over six weeks in February and March 2005. Google came out best with the most pages updated almost daily, but MSN had the best "worst case" scenario with no page more than 20 days old. Yahoo was said to be "chaotic." There's much much more in the paper which, sadly and ironically, is already out of date in terms of knowing what's happening right now. But having benchmark for various points in time is great.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:06 PM | Permalink

August 31, 2005

MSN Searches RSS Deeper from Robin Good looks at how MSN Search now has two new undocumented feed searching commands, including the ability to full-text search within feeds.

The first command is feed: that allows you to tell MSN Search that you want to search for material just within feeds it has indexed, rather than across web pages and other documents. It's similar to existing filetype commands that let you limit searching to things such as Word documents or PDF files.

How about an example? Try feed:"hurricane katrina", and you'll get a list of feeds that have that exact phrase within them. Look at the first page listed, a feed from the National Hurricane Center. In the cached copy, you'll see that phrase appearing in the feed.

Keep in mind that only text in a feed is indexed, and that may be different from the text in a post referenced in a feed. In other words, some blogs and other sources don't send out the full text of their posts in feeds. In other cases, some people will write custom descriptions so that what's in the feed will be different than what's on the page.

Overall, the feed: command isn't that wonderful, though it's still nice to have. Use it if you're trying to narrow down a mention that may have happened in the blogosphere, since many blogs have feeds, so this is a way to drill into that subset of content. But plenty of non-blog pages also have feeds, so it's not perfect. Plus, since you're only looking in feeds rather than the full text of post, you might miss items you are interested in.

The second command is hasfeed: that's supposed to bring back any page that links to a feed that has those words in the feed content, from what I understand. That's not what I found, however. Running hasfeed:google brought back the Google home page first, and that page has no feed on it nor any links to feeds that I can see.

Robin's article has a few examples he was sent by MSN, and it seems like using hasfeed: with site: works better, as a way to see if a particular site offers any feeds. For example, hasfeed: site:searchenginewatch.com does bring back pages within the searchenginewatch.com domain and subdomains that link to feeds -- since we have a link to every feed on every page.

A better combination shown in the examples Robin was sent is something like feed: site:searchenginewatch.com. That brings back only feed content from within the searchenginewatch.com domain and subdomains -- and it did catch all the major ones we have. Our old feed URLs are being used, rather than the new redirected ones. But the redirect change just happened last week, so that's not too surprising.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:59 AM | Permalink

August 26, 2005

The other day I posted about a paper presented at the SIGIR conference a few week's ago. Apparently, that got Findory CEO, Greg Linden, looking for other papers from the conference. Well, he found, "Personalized Search via Automated Analysis of Interests and Activities" from Microsoft Research. Greg shares a few thoughts about it in this GWG blog post.

Another paper and a very interesting read from Microsoft Research (also presented at the SIGIR conference), is titled: Detecting Dominant Locations from Search Queries (PDF). This Search-Science blog post provides a summary.

Want More? Here's a selected list of other search-related research papers that MSR presented at SIGIR. The links will take you to an abstract where you'll also find access to the full text.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:16 PM | Permalink

August 22, 2005

Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny noticed that MSN Search seemed to be overactively hitting his RSS feed, prompting MSN Search to respond via its blog that the news and blog crawler in testing may have been a tad hyperactive. MSN promises some tuning to get it to behave.

FYI, MSNBot does have instructions you can use to tell it to slow down, something put in place soon after the main web crawler prompted some complaints last year, when it was a bit hyperactive.

It's unclear whether the news/blog/feed crawler is using the same robot name and thus responding to the same commands. Jeremy doesn't have them on his site, nor did Greg Hughes who also blogged a complaint, but others who have complained might have.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:10 PM | Permalink

August 16, 2005

I'm sure it's happened to other search engines in the past, but MSN Indexes Ask Jeeves over at our SEW Forums looks at how MSN is listing fourth for a search on big blue pineapple chair its own search results for that query. Talk about a circular loop! Barry Schwartz of Feedster Top 500-ranked-blog SearchEngineRoundtable.com and one of our SEW forum moderators explains more in the thread on how it happened.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:47 PM | Permalink

August 4, 2005

Today guest writer Marcela De Vivo wraps up her look at search engine penalties, describing those applied by Yahoo and MSN. Yahoo's penalties are similar to Google's, but can be applied in different circumstances, and in some cases are harder to remove. Read on for more in today's SearchDay article, Search Engine Penalties at Yahoo & MSN.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:07 AM | Permalink

June 24, 2005

I previously blogged Greg Linden's post about MSN new search technology earlier, but he's since updated it to try and translate into plain English what the neural net technlogy does. As I thought, it is a case of teaching/training the system what's "right" for certain things and then hoping it will discover the right signals to let it locate more right things automatically. Want to discuss? Join our forum thread, June 2005 MSN Search Update & Neural Net Tech. For more background, see MSN Search Gets Neural Net/RankNet Technology & (Potentially) Awesome New Search Commands.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:38 AM | Permalink

June 22, 2005

Local, Relevance, and Japan! from the MSN Search WebLog talks about MSN Search using a new relevancy ranking system based on "Neural Net" technology, along with new search commands -- such as anchor text searching -- now available.

The cynical part of me is expecting that soon we'll be hearing about "MSN Search With New Neural Net Technology" coming in the marketing. Google never did a "Google With PageRank Technology" push, but it did often offer up PageRank as something that made it special. Meanwhile, ads for Ask Jeeves over here in the UK keep going on about "Ask Jeeves With New Teoma Technology," which makes me laugh, given that Ask has owned Teoma's technology for several years. When did it become new again?

Anyway, the post has a really cool picture illustrating how the "correct" page for a search on pbs evolution videos wasn't ranking well in early May but then through the help of the new technology moved up to the top position by June. Of course, that other neural net technology -- the human brain inside of an editor -- could have made the change in a few minutes.

OK, in fairness, you do want automated systems to learn how to do this stuff better. You can't have human editors constantly meddling in search results. But the occasional intervention would be nice.

Neural Net & RankNet

So what about with Neural Net technology? Kudos to Greg Linden. In his MSN Search and Learning to Rank post, he dug up a paper about the topic from Microsoft Research: Learning to Rank using Gradient Descent (PDF format).

The paper talks about RankNet, a much better sounding name for the technology. I'd love to give you a one sentence summary of what it does, but so far, that escapes me despite reading the paper several times. There's sure to be discussion and analysis, which I'll point to. I'll also be following up with MSN Search directly on this.

The impression I have at the moment is that the system is trained in some way to recognize what is good (trained by algorithms, human choices, I don't know) which in turn uses that data to refine results. It sounds similar to TrustRank, which we've touched on and that I'll be exploring more in the future. But it could also be me misinterpreting the paper.

The Deneuralized Do OK

Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Google have made no claims to having similar neural net technology, though as Greg noted, a coauthor of the RankNet paper works at Google. How do the others do for that PBS query?

Ask Jeeves, pbs evolution videos, same number one page as MSN Search
Google, pbs evolution videos, same number one page as MSN Search
Yahoo, pbs evolution videos, number two page at MSN Search is number one; number one page at MSN Search is number two. Both are from the same PBS site.

So either as good or practically as good -- and the practically part in Yahoo's case could be argued as good, depending on your particular viewpoint.

New Commands

Aside from new ranking technlogy, the blog post notes new search commands are now being offered by MSN Search. These are:

inanchor: The command I've been hoping for, pleading for, lost to the search world since dropped from AltaVista two or three years ago. This is supposed to let you search through anchor text -- in other words, the text of links. Why would you use it? Want to know all the pages that really are linking to the official George W. Bush biography with the words miserable failure in the links? This type of command should let you find them. However, I can't get it to work! inanchor:miserable failure link:http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html doesn't work, nor does inanchor:miserable failure or even just inanchor:miserable or inanchor:http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html miserable failure or various other attempts I've tried. I'm following up. In the meantime, the link: command can still be used to sort of do this, though as I've wrtiten before, it's not perfect: Wishing For Better Anchor Text Searching.
filetype: Lets you find pages of a particular filetype, such as HTML files or Word documents. Though said to be new, I'm fairly certain it's been around for at least a few weeks. It's listed on the advanced search operators page, while the other new commands are not. It wasn't offered when the beta service came out last November.
inurl: - Lets you find pages that have text within a URL, as opposed to the url: command, which lets you find specific URLs listed in the index.
intitle: - Lets you find pages that have text within the title tag of a document. For multiple words, it appears to work if you surround the words with quotes (example) or parentheses (example) but not with the words on their own (example and example). If you are after words appearing in the title in no particular order, it seems to work to use the command in front of each word (example).
linkdomain: - Lets you find all pages that link to anywhere within a particular domain, as opposed to the link: command, which lets you find all pages linking to a particular URL. For example, all links to the US White House (569,343) versus links just to the official George W. Bush biography page (26,414).
contains: - Supposed to let you find pages with links to documents of a particular filetype. For example, the MSN blog says contains:wma should bring up pages that have links to WMA files. But when I did that search, the pages that came up didn't necessarily seem to have such links, such as this example which ranked second.

When Gary gets in, I'm going to ask him to bang away on the new commands as he tested before at the beta launch. And if search commands seem cool (they are), see C:\> YubNub For "Command Line" Searching & Search Commands For the Majors that guides you to commands that the other major search engine offer.

June 2005 MSN Search Update & Neural Net Tech

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:27 AM | Permalink

April 6, 2005

Google & SEO Support For Advertisers now posted for Search Engine Watch members looks at how increased editorial listings support being given to large advertisers is raising concerns with search marketers and threatening the "church and state" division between ads and editorial results that Google has long sought to maintain.

In the story, I look at how Google will provide large advertisers with guidance on getting listed in its editorial results, upon request. The company has also provided this guidance to potential advertisers it seeks to gain.

Google acknowledges both points but stresses that only basic information is provided, similar to what someone might read on its web site or hear at a conference. Marketers I talked with for the story agree that no "insider" information to produce top rankings is being provided. However, the story does look anew at how some may get the go-ahead to do things that Google's public guidelines don't allow.

I also do a review of the situation with other search engines, in terms of what they say they do -- or do not -- provide in terms of express support. The story touches on how Ask Jeeves may finally come up with a free Add URL system of some type, while Yahoo hints at some type of new support system.

Overall, that's what I urge in the story -- a new, guaranteed paid support system that isn't tied to cost-per-click paid inclusion fees that all the major search engines should provide.

Be sure to also see For Whom the Search Bell Tolls out yesterday from Kevin Ryan at iMediaConnection. Kevin's heard the same stories that I've been told recently and touches on them in his piece that focuses on whether support provided by the search engines in part threatens the survival of SEM firms.

Meanwhile, see this post over in our forums that talks about how being a certified AdWords Professional wasn't enough for one search marketing company to be deemed big enough by Google to handle a large client.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:43 PM | Permalink

February 7, 2005

I've read a number of popular press accounts over the past week trying to assess how well the new MSN Search measures up against the other major search engines. The difficulty with these or any accounts is that, as I've written before, unless you conduct a battery of tests, coming up with a meaningful relevancy assessment isn't each. Is MSN a certain percentage better or worse than Google? No one knows.

The Chicago Tribune review, Search engine surge a boon, but it's ads nauseam from MSN, provides an example of this. It takes looks at MSN Search, conducts a query for "pearl harbor" and comes away unimpressed, finding things too commercial:

Much more than Yahoo and Google, MSN's search results are centered on commercial sites and people with things to sell rather than useful and relevant information.

Is it true, even for this single query? I thought it would be fun to do a breakdown and find out. Below are all the unpaid listings on Google, titles only, in the order shown. I'm including the three product search results that also show up at the top of the Google home page. I'm also showing the full information displayed to the searcher, though the exact layout is obviously different.

Google:

Remember Pearl Harbor - $18.74 - dvdplanet
Pearl Harbor (History Channel) - $22.99 - pcmall.com
Pearl Harbor (History Channel) - $22.99 - MacMall
National Geographic: Remembering Pearl Harbor--history, maps Experience the Pearl Harbor attack: virtual war maps, survivors' personal stories, rare photographs, time lines, and more from National Geographic. ... www.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ - 24k - Cached - Similar pages
Pearl Harbor Remembered main menu Pearl Harbor Memorial information. Map of Pearl Harbor. A brief overview of the attack. ... Additional source of information about Pearl Harbor. ... my.execpc.com/~dschaaf/mainmenu.html - 4k - Cached - Similar pages
Pearl Harbor Raid, 7 December 1941 This page features a historical overview and special image selection on the Pearl Harbor raid by the Japanese, 7 December 1941. ... www.history.navy.mil/photos/ events/wwii-pac/pearlhbr/pearlhbr.htm - 21k - Cached - Similar pages
Pearl Harbor Attack: Index of Action Reports Index to Action Reports and other special reports from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941. ... The Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941. ... www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-1.htm - 13k - Cached - Similar pages [ More results from www.history.navy.mil ]
Touchstone Pictures' "Pearl Harbor" - Official Web Site From producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay comes Touchstone Pictures'/Jerry Bruckheimer Films' Pearl Harbor, an epic saga of love and war. ... video.go.com/pearlharbor/ - 12k - Cached - Similar pages
Pearl Harbor (2001) Pearl Harbor - Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Comments, Discussion, Taglines, Trailers, Posters, Photos, Showtimes, Link to Official Site, Fan Sites. ... www.imdb.com/title/tt0213149/ - 51k - Feb 5, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages
USS Arizona Memorial (National Park Service) Oil droplets bubble to the surface of Pearl Harbor above the USS Arizona, creating a vivid link to the past. On a quiet Sunday morning ... www.nps.gov/usar/ - 21k - Feb 5, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages
Attack At Pearl Harbor, 1941 ... Attack At Pearl Harbor, 1941. Printer Friendly Version >>>. The surprise was complete. ... Homer N. Pearl Harbor: Why, How, Fleet Salvage and Final Appraisal (1968). ... www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pearl.htm - 27k - Feb 5, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages
EyeWitness to History EyeWitness. has a new location: eyewitnesstohistory.com. You will transferred to our new site in a few seconds. Please bookmark the ... www.ibiscom.com/pearl.htm - 1k - Feb 6, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages
Pearl Harbor - Mother of All Conspiracies The world's best webapge on the Pearl Harbor conspiracy and how Roosevelt committed treason to get America into World War II by encouraging a Japanese attack. ... www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/pearl.html - 65k - Cached - Similar pages

Now here's what was on MSN Search for unpaid listings:

Attack At Pearl Harbor, 1941 ... Pearl Harbor: The Day of Infamy - An Illustrated History by Dan van der Vat Day of Infamy by Walter Lord Attack At Pearl Harbor, 1941 Printer Friendly Version >>> T he surprise was complete. The ... o www.ibiscom.com/pearl.htm o Cached page o 2/4/2005 *
Pearl Harbor.com Guide to Pearl Harbor Hawaii ... Guide to USS Arizona Memorial, USS Bowfin Memorial and USS Missouri Memorial. A Pearl Harbor.com Exclusive... by George E. Elliott Jr. . Edited by David J. Castello Japanese warplanes rev up ... o www.pearl-harbor.com o Cached page o 2/5/2005
National Geographic: Remembering Pearl Harbor--history, maps ... and review recommended resources. Register for Nationalgeographic.com E-Mail Newsletters Pearl Harbor, a Touchstone Pictures film starring Ben Affleck, opens May 25, 2001. Visit the official movie ... o plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor o Cached page
Pearl Harbor (2001) ... from New York City to Italy were enlisted to produce period shoes in sizes 10 and 11. (more) PEARL HARBOR Memorabilia Books All Products User Comments: 10 out of 13 people found the following comment ... o us.imdb.com/Title?0213149 o Cached page o 2/7/2005
Battleship Missouri Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Official home of the Battleship Missouri Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Battleship Missouri (BB-63) Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii - Official Site. Tickets and Reservations How to Get Here Read ... o www.ussmissouri.com o Cached page o 2/6/2005 * DVDs about Pearl Harbor from Pearl Harbor.org
DVDs about Pearl Harbor from Pearl Harbor.org Home History Speeches Vintage Videos Photos Ships Forum ... o www.pearlharbor.org/center-dvd-pearl-harbor.asp o Cached page o 2/7/2005
Pearl Harbor Raid, 7 December 1941 ... to World peace. This page features a historical overview and special image selection on the Pearl Harbor raid, chosen from the more comprehensive coverage featured in the following pages, and those ... o www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/pearlhbr/pearlhbr.htm o Cached page o 2/6/2005
Hawaii Activities - Oahu Activities - Oahu Surf - Oahu Tours - Hawaii ... Bring your kids and see the real Polynesia. AlohaTopTen.com - Enjoy the history and beauty of Pearl Harbor, fabulous luaus, evening shows, island tours or a sunset dinner cruise as the lights of ... o www.hawaii.com/visit/oahu/activities/index.php o Cached page o 2/5/2005
Amazon.com: DVD: Pearl Harbor (2001) ... Dolby Digital 5.1), English, French (Dolby Digital 5.1) Journey to the Screen: The Making of Pearl Harbor History Channel show "Unsung Heroes" Faith Hill's music video "There You'll Be" DVD-ROM ... o www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00003CXTG?v=glance o Cached page o 2/6/2005

OK, what have we got that's the same? In this comparison, I'll also annotate a summary from my perspective on the pages shown.

National Geographic: Remembering Pearl Harbor--history, maps: From National Geographic, what looks to be a good collection of material you'd like to see in the top results. Both Google and MSN list the exact same page, though MSN picks up the alternative address of plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor.

Pearl Harbor (2001): Pearl Harbor was also, of course, a Hollywood blockbuster. This is a page from the Internet Movie Database on the file. Again, MSN has a slightly different URL than what Google lists, but they both lead to the same exact page.
Attack At Pearl Harbor, 1941: What looks to be a good page with some eyewitness accounts of the bombing. Google actually lists this same page twice, both the current address and a page that redirects to the new location. MSN lists the page once, the redirection address that leads to the current page.

Pearl Harbor Raid, 7 December 1941: Leads to a section at the US Naval Historical Center, which would appear to be a good choice. Google also lists a second page from this same web site -- different content, but still from the same web site.

What's unique at Google?

USS Arizona Memorial (National Park Service): Official web site for the USS Arizona memorial.
Touchstone Pictures' "Pearl Harbor" - Official Web Site: Official movie web site of the film Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor Remembered main menu: What looks to be a hobbyist web site about the raid. The info may be good; it's just the look and feel is not that of a professionally produced site.
Pearl Harbor - Mother of All Conspiracies: What looks to be a hobbyist site presenting an alternative view of the Pearl Harbor attack.

What's unique at MSN?

Battleship Missouri Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii: Official web site for the USS Missouri memorial in Pearl Harbor.
Amazon.com: DVD: Pearl Harbor (2001): By the movie, from Amazon.
DVDs about Pearl Harbor from Pearl Harbor.org: What looks to be a page from a hobbyist web site about Pearl Harbor. This page is a list of related DVDs for sale, and the site feels a bit like it's oriented toward attracting people to sell products.
Hawaii Activities - Oahu Activities - Oahu Surf - Oahu Tours - Hawaii: Page from a tourist site on visiting Hawaii, and not a very good one about visiting Pearl Harbor, at that.
Pearl Harbor.com Guide to Pearl Harbor Hawaii: What looks to be a hobbyist guide to visiting memorials to the battle. POSTSCRIPT: Phil Ringnalda correctly points out than rather being a hobbyist site, this instead appears to be a site that may have lifted text from a National Parks Service site and is designed to drive traffic for hotel reservations across the US.

So looking back on the unique items, I'd like all Google's choices. At MSN, the first one is good, but I like Google's choices better. The last four are more iffy. So verdict on the Trib's single query view? Again, never base overall conclusions on a single query, but...

MSN does feel more commercially oriented looking at this query and others I've personally seen. But that's more to me a sign it's a newer search engine that's still needs to evolve picking out the good stuff from things that might simply be designed to please a search engine's ranking algorithm.

The fact the technology seems to need more resistance to old-style on-the-page search ranking tactics is something that's come up on our forum and others I've read. SEO for MSN on our forums looks at this more.

Layout can have an impact. The Chicago Tribune reported seeing ads on Google and Yahoo for the query, just like those on MSN. But height and display of the first ads on MSN were larger than at the other two -- and thus fed to the impression that it's like all ads, all the time, at MSN.

I wrote about this before in my Microsoft Blogger Scoble Sticks With Google -- Though MSN Deserves A Break -- even getting out my ruler to measure ad height. Even if the ads are fewer, the look-and-feel will have a big impact on those viewing the site.

Even in the editorial results, you can see this reflected. Remember those Google results? Google also had these three additional results that came out of Froogle, which were integrated into the home page through a OneBox display:

Remember Pearl Harbor - $18.74 - dvdplanet
Pearl Harbor (History Channel) - $22.99 - pcmall.com
Pearl Harbor (History Channel) - $22.99 - MacMall

Add those in, and Google results might feel a little more commercial than the Tribune original came away with. But those results looked a bit different from the "regular" results and so quite likely were completely ignored by the Tribune reviewer. That's good news for those searchers who really didn't want to get product information in this query. It's bad news for those who might.

That also points out the importance of search subjectivity. This reviewer probably wasn't thinking of Pearl Harbor in terms of a commercial perspective. But if you had wanted to purchase the movie or documentaries about the attack, your view of the results might similarly change.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:05 PM | Permalink

February 2, 2005

Annoyingly, the launch of the new MSN search engine came along with a helpful "feature" forcing me to MSN UK, because I'm based in the UK. Even if I went to search.msn.com, I was redirected to search.msn.co.uk.

I sent a query to MSN about this yesterday and have yet to hear back. But someone clearly got the message, because today I found a new "Back to search.msn.com" link at the bottom of the MSN UK home page I was shown. Selecting that finally overrode the switching.

Those being switched to other country-specific versions of MSN should look for similar links. If you don't find it, then try this: http://search.msn.com/?noredir=1. That might solve it, if you really want MSN as based out of the US.

Why might you? For one, the results I see on MSN UK are often radically different than on MSN US, more aimed toward what MSN seems to think UK users want. That's great when it works -- but when it doesn't, you may wish to search at the US-based site.

FYI, other search engines like Google might also do such redirection. In this cases, you'll often find similar links that let you override it. Our forum thread Google forcing UK users to google.co.uk looks at this more, including the situation with Lycos where even if you use the "override" link, it stupidly still redirects you.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:25 AM | Permalink

February 1, 2005

Two years after saying it would create its own search engine from scratch, MSN Search has officially released its new technology on its main sites around the world. Today's SearchDay article, MSN Search Officially Switches To Its Own Technology, looks at what's new since the beta came out last year and what may come.

Many MSN Direct Answers Now Online from Gary looks more closely at how with this launch, MSN is increasing the number of direct answers it provides -- something other search engines are also doing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:01 AM | Permalink

When MSN rereleased their search beta last November, they joined several other general purpose web engines offering direct answers on search results pages. At that point, these types of results seemed to appear for very few queries but with today's official launch, I'm noticing many more direct answers.

Direct answers and search shortcuts continue to gain momentum as way that can an search engine can save the searcher effort while at the same time delivering them an answer or a direct link from a trusted sources. In many ways, this is a prelude to search engines becoming answer engines for certain types of "ready reference" queries.

Shortcuts and direct answers were first introduced by AltaVista in 2002. Since that time, Ask Jeeves (they regularly add Smart Search options), Yahoo, Google, and most recently AOL have joined in. We have an overview and links to what each of these services offer in this blog post.

MSN offers direct answers for several types of queries on search results pages. Material comes from their Encarta encyclopedia. Here are a few examples:

+ Mathematical (via their web calculator) 5x2 cos 45 degrees Btw, the first web engine calculator was introduced by AllTheWeb in April 2003.

+ Definitions Define baseball What is a dog

+ Conversions How many feet in one mile How many pints are in 18 quarts?

+ Geographical Data Capital of Canada What is the mass of Pluto?

+ Sports Who won the World Series in 1979? Who is Barry Bonds?

+ History Who was Jimmy Carter's Vice President? What was the Battle of Waterloo?

+ Popular Culture Biographies Who are the Rolling Stones? Who is Donald Trump

+ Nutrition How many calories in a strawberry? How many carbohydrates in peas?

Finally, for many pop music solo artists and groups, MSN will place bio info on the serp along with direct links to MSN Music.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:01 AM | Permalink

January 20, 2005

People in our forums are reporting that the main MSN Search site is now looking the same as the beta MSN Search site. I see the same. We could all be among the growing number of people being shown the beta even though we go to the main site's URL as part of the broader rollout that MSN promised earlier this month. Or, it could be that MSN has flipped the switch and formally dumped the old Yahoo-powered site with their new MSN-powered one. I'll check and come back. Want to comment or report what you're seeing? Visit the IMO New MSN Search is NOW LIVE! in our forums.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:26 AM | Permalink

January 14, 2005

SEW forum moderator AussieWebmaster passes along news that he's heard from an high level MSN contact the new MSN search engine currently being beta tested will move to the main MSN Search site on Feb. 1.

That fits in well with some timings we've heard in the past. MSN had promised the new technology would be integrated into the service by the end of last year. But after the beta launch, various dates were being cited by those quoting MSN, including the Wall Street Journal saying the end of January 2005. We were told by MSN it would be at the latest in early 2005.

MSN has already warned that more people using the regular site will begin getting results from the new beta technology, which has long been a precursor to a major switch with the service.

Paid listings from Overture are also said to be continuing through the end of the year. Rumors that MSN might be gearing up to run its own self-serve paid listings program circulated earlier this month -- but this suggests that any timing of that won't be immediate.

See our forum thread MSN Search Out of Beta Feb. 1 for the news and discussion following it.

Postscript: Our forum thread IMO New MSN Search is NOW LIVE! looks at how the rollout might come even earlier than the official announcement.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:52 AM | Permalink

January 12, 2005

Gary spotted on Monday that MSN was offering query results via RSS. Yesterday, MSN made it official. RSS Feeds for Search Results from the site's blog explains how this is an alpha feature for the beta MSN Search service and provides step-by-step instructions.

Right now, it's clunky -- involving you doing a search, then adding the &format=rss command to the end of your query string. The blog calls for suggestions. For a start, adding a link or icon to the bottom of the search results page with the right command already embedded would be a big help.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:14 AM | Permalink

January 11, 2005

The MSN Search Beta opened to the public some time ago, but only those actively seeking it out really got to try it. MSN has routed a small number of those using the regular MSN Search site to the beta since its launch in November. Now, even more people will be routed over beginning next week, the service has said via its blog: Beta Ramp-Up. No official date for when the service will go live has been updated, but the ramp up suggests that it won't be long now.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:52 AM | Permalink

January 10, 2005

Two things to report.

First, I've noticed that a "clear link" (not visible in most web browsers) labeled RSS is included in the source code of MSN Search Beta results pages. Look for it near the end of the page code. I also have a screen shot here. RSS and MSN Web Search? Very interesting!

UPDATE: Greg Linden has posted an example of how to access MSN Beta search results delivered as an RSS feed. A new current awareness tool. Thanks Greg!

Second, in addition to the links for web, news, images, and desktop search above the search box on a serp, a NEW link for Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia is now visible.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:51 AM | Permalink

December 22, 2004

Use a Mozilla-based browser like Firefox, with the integrated search box? The ability to hit a number of search engines is already built in, but not the beta MSN Search UK service. Solution for those who want it? Matt Cox has one for you here: MSN UK Search (beta) Mycroft Plug-in. Wait, you want the global MSN Search beta? No worries, he points over to one on the Ryanware Blog: MSN Search Beta search plugin for Mozilla.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:30 PM | Permalink

This afternoon and just in time for the holidays, let's say hello to the MSN Search Wiki.

The new wiki is another way of interacting with the MSN Search team. MSN also offers a msnsearch WebLog, newsgroup.

MSN also has a rep who occasionally lurks in the WMW Forum. Yes, SEW has an MSN Search forum as well -- while other search reps frequent our forum, MSN has yet to appear. We're told they're working on it.

The MSN Search wiki can be read by anyone and covers both their algorithmic search tool and their desktop search app. If you're interested in editing you'll need to be a registered user.

Topics include: + What are our competitors doing? What do you think of it? + What features do you want from a search engine? + How should the website and the toolbar work together?

If 2004 was the year of the web search blog will 2005 be the year of the search wiki?

Posted by Gary Price at 1:27 PM | Permalink

Internetnews.com's Susan Kuchinskas had a chat with MSN product manager Justin Osmer last week during SES and her report is now available. Microsoft Search to be Pervasive.

You'll read about the development of the MSN's algorithmic search engine (it took about 18 months) and their just released desktop search app/toolbar suite.

"We believe it makes more sense to have [desktop search] based in the client environment," Osmer said. "From both the security standpoint and user testing, we found that when I'm looking for something on my PC, I want to be on my PC, and I don't want a bunch of Web results clogging my PC." He added that there are safety implications in caching or indexing previously viewed Web pages, as Google Desktop Search does, so MSN chosen not to do that.

The article also includes comments from Osmer about beta releases (including a knock at Google?) and Microsoft's plans for releasing API's once MSN Search officially launches.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:08 PM | Permalink

December 13, 2004

Newsweek's Steven Levy spends some time at Microsoft hq and offers an inside look at the MS search team in the article: For Softies, Search Is the New Black.

The article opens with the following passage:

Bill Gates has a Google thing. When I asked him about the search competition last summer, he turned on the sarcasm. "We'll never be as cool as them. Every conference you go to, there they are dressed in black, and no one is cooler!" Clearly Gates's dander was up, not only because the Google upstarts were eating his lunch, but they were press darlings as well. Behind the rant was a taunting subtext: watch me. Bill, you see, had been busy figuring how to get his lunch back.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:36 PM | Permalink

December 7, 2004

I've written before that on my wishlist would be for Google and its competitors to offer the ability to search for links across the web that point at a particular page with certain terms in the links.

In other words, many are familiar with the famous miserable failure results that bring up the official George W. Bush biography on several of the major search engines. But none of them make it possible to see exactly what pages are linking to the biography with those words in them.

Sure, I can do a backlink lookup on Google for pages linking to the bio like this. But that shows me all pages that Google wishes to reveal that link to the page -- not the pages that link and use the words "miserable failure" in the links.

At MSN's beta, this search lets me find pages that link to the bio and use the words "miserable failure" on the page, something you can't do at Google or Yahoo. But that's still not what I want. Some of those pages might link to the bio but NOT with those words in the link itself. This search still doesn't help if I or other enquiring searchers want to know who exactly is influencing a link bomb.

OK, so enquiring search marketers may also want to know -- and fear of giving them too much information may be why we don't have this ability. AltaVista once gave it, but that support ended earlier this year. I think the fear is overblown, and I stand ready to give big kudos to the first search engine that resurrects this past feature.

Google does offer some ability to find matches showing words in anchor text, as well as in title tags and in URLs. Do the results that come up in response to these special search commands relate to how Google ranks web pages? That's being discussed by marketers in our forums: What Do Google's Allinanchor, Allintitle & Allinurl Results Tell Us?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:25 AM | Permalink

December 6, 2004

The msnsearch WebLog has a post about the spelling correction software developed for the new MSN Search.

To improve the speller we worked with Silviu Cucerzan and Eric Brill from Microsoft Researchs Text Mining, Search and Navigation Group. Silviu and Eric have developed some novel techniques for using search query statistics and iterative transformation of query strings to improve spell correction. Their published paper on this topic Spelling correction as an iterative process that exploits the collective knowledge of web users goes into much more detail on some of the technical thinking that inspired the spelling correction system we built.

Btw, in September we posted about Eric Brill and the Text Mining, Search and Navigation Group's work in developing answer engine technology. You can also find a small collection of Microsoft publications about search here.

MSN's blog also explains more details on how its Inside Near Me Search feature works to try and deliver locally-targeted results.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:23 PM | Permalink

November 19, 2004

Worried the new MSN crawler isn't picking up your pages? Now you can submit to the service. As with most add URL pages throughout the years, there's no guarantee pages will actually be added, however. But fear not -- as with most crawlers, many of your pages will naturally get picked up.

The MSN Search blog also points out the new submit page along with other submission tips for site owners in its new Site Owner Help section

One worrisome note from a quick review of the material. On the page about site descriptions, the example for the meta description tag shown the has both http-equiv= and name= elements, rather than just one or the other. I'm fairly positive only one is required, and it's the name= element that I've long suggested using.

My memory is dusty on this, because it was an issue that came up sooooo very long ago. But I think the http-equiv element is for meta tags that are substituting for info that is normally given by a web server, like redirection or language encoding.

I'll check with MSN on this, as well as if there's any limits to follow for the new Add URL page. By the way, there's also a fast page removal option, should you need it -- basically, sending email to a special address as outlined here. And for more about the meta description tag, see my long-standing page: How To Use HTML Meta Tags.

Postscript:

MSN has told me the http-equiv format shown for meta description tags on its help pages is an error, and they plan to correct.

I also asked about submission limits. My general advice to people for submitting is to submit home pages and maybe one or two inside pages for a brand new site, then let the crawler do the rest. I also sometimes tell people to submit brand new pages if they are really worried or to submit pages that for whatever reason aren't showing.

MSN said this is good advice for its service. They didn't say there was any limit for those who still prefer to do a "deep" submit of all pages, but that's probably not going to help those who do so.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:20 AM | Permalink

November 15, 2004

If you thought the Yahoo Search Blog was edgy (I have, compared to the Google Blog), the new MSN Search Blog is even less corporate.

In the past few days, it has jumped right in to comment about leaked screenshots of the MSN Desktop Search tool, to deny it made Google explicitly more evil than Satan (see my past blog post on this) and to explain a new algorithm change has dropped Google from that query on evilness.

Sadly, the blog says "We won't be commenting on the ranking of individual results from here on out." Why not -- they should, if it's relevant to many people. That type of openness is great. Google did it with the issue of filtering Chinese news. I'd love to see much more of it from everyone.

said

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:02 AM | Permalink

November 12, 2004

After a pretty unlikely suggestion that MSN is somehow grabbing listings from Google, MSN's forum poster MSN Dude popped up in a WebmasterWorld.com thread to deny the accusations. That brought out Google's long-time forum poster GoogleGuy in the same thread.

A punch up? Not at all. Instead, a chummy welcome to the world of crawling and support that Google thought the accusations didn't hold water. But in another thread spotted by Peter Da Vanzo, is GoogleGuy suggesting that site owners get to work reverse-engineering MSN's search algorithm?

Well, it's not unprecedented. Back in 2003, GoogleGuy had some suggestions in terms of search engine optimization for...AltaVista!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:02 AM | Permalink

November 11, 2004

Way back in 1999, one of the first famous Google blips came up. A search for more evil than satan found Microsoft's home page as number one in Google. My past article, More Evil Than Dr. Evil, looks at the situation more.

That's no longer the case on Google -- but something similar has happened on the new MSN Search site. In fair turnabout, a search for more evil than satan there find Google as number one. Thanks for the tip via Kevin Fox.

For the record, more evil at satan at Yahoo doesn't bring up either Microsoft or Google. Articles listed do declare that Microsoft has purchased evil from Satan, however -- and that PowerPoint Is Evil.

Postscript: Google has since been dropped as more evil than Satan at MSN, as this post explains: MSN Search Blog Comments On Evil & Rumors

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:44 PM | Permalink

Here's a look at some of the press coverage that the MSN Search beta launch is receiving today.

+ Microsoft Launches Search Beta: Platform Ho! Source: Searchblog ...perhaps the most important news I gleaned from talking to [Microsoft's Justin] Osmer was this: Microsoft has every intention of opening up its search APIs and allowing third party developers to leverage their search platform for new and innovative applications. This is where the future lies, in my mind, and I find that declaration a refreshing indication of where Microsoft is heading.

+ Microsoft Unveils Its Internet Search Engine, Quietly Source: New York Times The highest-ranking official who was willing to discuss the rollout was Adam Sohn, director of sales and marketing for the MSN Web portal. He said Microsoft's intention was not to compete with Google, currently the Internet's dominant search engine, but instead to "delight" its own customers...But while dismissing talk of an Internet search war, Mr. Sohn acknowledged that Microsoft hoped its new search abilities might entice Web surfers who do not have what he termed a "religious" commitment to Google.

+ Microsoft gets in on search party Source: USA Today Forrester analyst Charlene Li says the bottom line on Microsoft's search moves is that the world's biggest software maker is now able to compete with Google and Yahoo. This finally brings Microsoft to the table," she says. "It's like there's this party, and one person has been missing -- Microsoft. Now the party can begin.

+ MSN Search takes on Google and Yahoo! Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer To get people to switch from Google, (MSN Search) is going to have to deliver noticeably better results right away, and I just think that's hard to do, at least for Web pages," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Kirkland-based research firm Directions on Microsoft.

+ Search engine ready to roll Microsoft to present its new challenge to Yahoo, Google Source: San Francisco Chronicle Mark Mahaney, an analyst for American Technology Research, said that Microsoft's future in search is helped by its deep pockets and the popularity of its MSN portal, one of the busiest Internet destinations. He added that Microsoft could really gain market share if it eventually incorporated the new search engine into its dominant browser, Internet Explorer. Of course, it's a negative development for Google and Yahoo because you have a major company coming in that has the ability to really promote the hell out of it," Mahaney said

Posted by Gary Price at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like Yahoo and Google, MSN has launched a new blog about their search engine.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris gives you our overview on the new MSN Search technology. Meanwhile, I've been banging away to see how search syntax and other features hold up. Here are some early findings:

+ Microsoft is claiming an index size of greater than 5 billion fully indexed web pages. Google increased their total page count to more than 8 billion pages last night.

+ The new index offers access to many file formats but you're unable to limit to a specific one. (ie. filetype:) You're also unable to limit by: Title URL Anchor Text Note to MSN: Please add these.

+ I've tried several searches using the "near me" option and haven't found the results to be very useful.

+ Results from the image index are identical to what you'll find at Picsearch.

+ You can refine your image search results directly from the serp and view either color/black & white. You can also refine by image size.

+ You'll notice with MSN's Search Builder that we have another use of "sliders" to modify results. This is what we've seen from Yahoo SmartSort and Kayak.com.

+ Boolean? Yes Implied And NOT or - OR or |

+ The new MSN database doesn't search common stopwords. They are used when searched in a phrase. Compare: A vs. B vs. C

+ You can plug some/any/all of the syntax available via the Search Builder directly into any search box. Site: Link: Loc: (foo) Example: Loc:au (Australia) Language: (code) Example: Language: fr (French) [mtch=foo} Larger number (0-100) places more emphasis on the match between your exact search words and your results. {popl=foo} Greater number (0-100) means more links to the page. {frsh=foo} Greater number (0-100) means more likely updated recently.

+ Phil Bradley mentions that nested searches with parethesis work and the database has a 10 term query limit (same as Google)

+ The "Settings" page offers an option to either increase to 3 or decrease to 1 the number of inline results viewable on a results page.

+ NOTE: As of 8.30 AM EST I'm unable to get the following features to work. Opening day jitters? Using define will place a definition from Encarta at the top of the results page along with a link for a more complete definition. Note: This doesn't work (at least when I tested) for every definable term. ++ The news release mentions that for some "ready reference" (example: What is the capital of Turkey) queries an ANSWER will be presented at the top of the results page with material coming from Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia. Good idea, but not a new one. Ask Jeeves has been offering this with their Smart Answers program for over a year.

+ Since this is a beta release, the flagship site still uses the MSN interface and database that's been online for some time. here.

+ Remember, it's only a beta. Google or Yahoo killer? I agree with Chris, it's not. However, aren't several large web indexes a good thing from the searcher point of view? Do only one or two automobile manufacturers exist? It's wonderful to have another unique web index online. The more the merrier. It will be interesting to see the overlap with Google and Yahoo.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As rumored, MSN has rereleased its new search engine to the public today. However, the new technology is appearing on the MSN Search Beta site rather than the flagship MSN Search site for now. Chris Sherman has a full review of what you'll find at the beta site in today's SearchDay: Microsoft Unveils its New Search Engine - At Last. Some related blog posts to also consider:

No, Microsoft's Not A Google Killer. Nor A Yahoo Killer: Covers how Microsoft is not going to do a Netscape to Google and Yahoo.
MSN Search Technology To Debut (Again) This Week: Puts past releases from MSN of its new search technology into perspective with this latest move -- plus goes all the way back to 1998 to track milestones in Microsoft's progress toward owning its own search engine.
Coincidentally, Google's Index Size Jumps: Looks at how Google slips in to steal one of Microsoft's planned talking points, that of being the "biggest" search engine out there.

Want to comment? Visit our forum thread: New MSN Search Goes LIVE in Beta!.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 10, 2004

Rumors are swirling that MSN plans to release its new search technology this week. But why's that big news? After all, hasn't this technology already been released twice now to the public?

Yes, it has. But past releases have been via the MSN Sandbox site, a location really only visited by search marketers, webmasters, researchers and others wanting to play with the new technology.

In contrast, MSN may be planning to release the new search technology in places where the public is more likely to access it. Where might that be?

MSN Search Beta is a long-standing testing site that MSN uses. This is more accessible to the public than the MSN Sandbox. However, if released here, the vast majority of the public still won't encounter the new technology. However, it would join the new technology up with the new look-and-feel of MSN or perhaps show some new features we've had glimpses at before.
MSN Search is the flagship MSN site. If the technology goes up there, that's a major change that ousts the current technology that MSN licenses from Yahoo. The Overture paid listings provided by Yahoo would remain.

One way or another, the technology is supposed to go up on MSN Search by the end of the year. That's been promised by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. The timeline below provides more details about this.

What's the source of these rumors? MSN is briefing members of the press about the launch, and the news is leaking out. But exact details other than a release is planned are sparse. For coverage, see articles from the New York Times and the Wall St. Journal.

Suffice to say, if there are major press briefings underway by any major search engine, we're generally included those. If we have been briefed on something ahead of a launch, then we'll provide our usual comprehensive coverage when the launch happens. So if there's news from MSN this week, rest assured we'll bring it to you.

Here's the timeline of important announcements and releases in Microsoft's progress toward having its own search engine:

October 1997: Rumors of a Microsoft search engine, code-named Yukon, turn into reality when Microsoft announces it will launch its own service. But instead of using its own technology, it opts to license search results from Inktomi. Microsoft executives proclaim the service will be "the freshest, most current index available to consumers."
Sept. 8, 1998: Microsoft finally releases its Inktomi-powered service called MSN Search, after dumping the idea to call it Internet Start.
Jan. 1999: After hailing Inktomi's technology as wonderful only months before, MSN drops that partnership in favor of AltaVista because of a better business opportunity.
Mar. 1999: Before AltaVista's results have even been integrated into MSN Search, the company enters into a new agreement to license LookSmart's human-powered results. These become the "main" or most prominent results on MSN.
Dec. 1999: MSN switches back to using Inktomi's results, dumping AltaVista. However, LookSmart's results remain the main listings on the site. Inktomi results are only shown when LookSmart has no matches.
Feb. 2000: MSN launches its own self-serve, CPM-based paid listings on its site.
Feb. 2001: MSN begins outsourcing for paid listings from Overture.
Feb. 2003: MSN is rumored to have wanted to buy AltaVista, which Overture ended up purchasing. Microsoft then says it was only window-shopping and is still deciding what direction to go in the future: buy, continue to outsource or build search technology internally.
April & May 2003: Microsoft makes decision to invest in search and build technology internally, with a first step the release of its own web page crawler, MSNBOT.
Oct. 2003: MSN hires Overture's chief technology officer Paul Ryan, fueling suspicion that it will develop its own in-house paid listing technology. However, Ryan leaves the company in Feb. 2004.
July 1, 2004: MSN makes major changes to the look-and-feel of its MSN Search site. It also releases a preview of its new web search technology. However, this new technology does NOT power the revamped MSN Search.
Oct. 4, 2004: MSN launches a second tech preview with some changes. We also get inadvertent glimpses of an interesting "Search Builder" feature and relevancy sliders that appear in the works.
Nov. 11, 2004: If the rumors are true, MSN will move its new search technology to either MSN Search Beta or MSN Search on this day.
Dec. 31, 2004: MSN's new web search technology should be integrated into the main MSN Search site by this date or earlier, as promised by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. This is especially likely given that a massive marketing campaign is in the works. It would be odd to have a big marketing push when your search engine remains powered by your rival Yahoo. MSN's desktop search technology is due out by the end of this month or sooner, according to past statements.
June 2005: MSN's agreement to use Yahoo's paid listings from Overture expires.
Dec. 2005: MSN's agreement to use Yahoo's unpaid crawler-based search results expires. The agreement can be ended earlier, if desired.

Want to comment? Visit our forum thread: MSN Search to go Live Thursday, Nov 11th.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 26, 2004

Earlier this month, the UK version of MSN's search preview showed some interesting relevancy sliders that quickly disappeared. Now I've spotted them via the MSN page caching server.

MSN Search Technology Preview

http://cc.msnscache.com/

I went directly to the site and while my searches DIDN'T work I was able to get a glimpse of what the new MSN Search product might look like and some of the features that could be in the works. We will have to wait and see.

The page is still online (you can check it out yourself) but I've also included links to a few screenshots in this post.

1) At the top of the page you'll notice links for Web, News, Image, and PC search. At the moment "PC" links to the MSN toolbar but this could be where they'll offer up some type of desktop search tool.

2) Clicking the green "arrow" next to the search box offers a pull-down menu with different database options. You will not see PC search listed but an option to run a dictionary search.

3) A link to a Spanish language version of the interface (not working).

4) Clicking "Search Builder" offers several "menu driven" advanced search options and one-click ability to add them to your query. + Add search terms + Limit by Site + Backlinks + Limit by Region + Limit by Language

+ Finally, and what I found most interesting, an option to use three "sliders" to manipulate the ranking of pages. In other words, add or reduce the weight of certain ranking factors. Some might even call it personalization since the results I see might be different than the ones someone else views for the identical search. The sliders are labeled: + Updated recently--Static + Very popular--Less popular + Approximate match--Exact match

The use of "sliders" to manipulate results are also seen with Yahoo's Smart Sort and Kayak's new travel engine.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 4, 2004

MSN's Search Tech Preview 2 is now "officially" live and ready for testing. It was available for a short period of time on Friday but was soon taken down. You'll find an extended entry from me about what's in the new release here: MSN Search Preview Back Online.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 1, 2004

A second technology preview of MSN's new search technology was online briefly for testing today. MSN says that it was run in a small percentage of its various country-specific markets, like the UK, to do load and stress tests. The previews have now come down, MSN says. When it was up, the site said:

The database is larger than with Tech Preview One, according to its About page
Cached versions of pages were available. Similar to what we've seen with other engines, the date the page was cached was included.
Still no advanced interface to try on the US side. A UK version of the service provided a number of interesting refinement tools, such as filtering by filetype, date, a numeric range feature and even some relevancy sliders or "equalizers."
Up to two results per domain were visible on a results page. The second result was indented. A green button positioned next to a hyperlink reads, "See more results from..."
Results were not numbered as they are at Yahoo.

Tech Preview One was available for a short period of time this summer (see our past article, MSN Search Gets New Look; Microsoft Gets New Search Engine).

Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread: MSN Search Preview 2 Up.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)