Microsoft Releases Beta Search Engine

[Hope]

http://beta.search.msn.com/

After doing some basic searches on travel related search terms, I am extremely disappointed. It seems the algorithm for this new MSN leans towards keyword stuffing. If you stuff keywords into your page, then you rank well on many major search terms.

The other thing that strikes me is the fact that there is a ton of affiliate sites mixed in with official sites. I was doing searches for “city name hotel”, “city name resort” and “city name spa”. It seems that the actual hotel sites do not have any weight. It is of my opinion that if someone is searching the term “hotel” then they are wanting to learn about hotels, not book a room yet. If the search term was “reservations” then I can understand all these third party booking sites. This is disappointing to me.

The next search I did was “SEO”. It returns SEO forums, chats and blogs before it returned any actual SEOs. Now, I am not going to complain too much because my site was on the fist page of the results.

I guess the results are mixed for me. My clients don’t rank that well, but I do. I have never optimized my site for the search engines because I have never had time. It is interesting that I am ranking.

[stoner3221]

I was not impressed with the results. Using directories as an example I found that they do not go as deep into the topics as Google or Yahoo does.

[Hope]

Well it will be interesting to watch what happens. I don't think it will ever rival Google unless M$ forces their hand like they did with Netscape.

[smarties]

Anyone knows when they gonna finish their new index and make it available for everybody?

[SensoVision]

from what I know we don't have any Microsoft workers on board but if there are some let us know please and if be serious I guess they try to pust it to public as soon as possible, just look on the rest of their products e.g. Windows, they always try to push products even if they are not completely tested.