MSN new search

[redcog]

Well, its finally arrived - MSNs search engine is now providing users with the beta results.

Is everyone happy with them? Are you seeing increased traffic? Could this knock google off the top slot?

[Ian J]

I have been playing with it with for a few weeks now in the business areas that I am interested in but they seem to have just as much duplicate content on affiliate sites as Google does. I have reported this to them a couple of times and expect that thye will take as much notice as Google did - none.

At least they rank my site third so it isn't all bad.

[redcog]

Our site seems to be ranking very well for all our keyphrases - unlike google at the moment. We had a complete front end rework this week, and began optimising for a new set of keyphrases. MSN has picked this up immediately, however google has dropped us - which I assume is only temporary.

Does anyone exactly know what happens when you make a considerable change to your site - does it take google a while to re-index and rank you again?

[Ian J]

Google seems to like my site so when I made major changes they reflected on the page rankings very quickly.

In order to safeguard my existing PR and rankings I kept my existing pages on line in addition to the new ones, with cross links between them and it seems to have worked.

[Inzvestor]

Nearly all my sites have achieved front page listings as s result of MSN's spidering, using common search terms.

I have been running a free, targeted campaign, which appears to be paying off.

[inbakumar]

Well done Inzvestor! We are not that lucky but doing ok. For one of our main targeted search phrases we are #1 - bless them folks at MSN . We are doing ok with other search terms but the main problem seem to be not all of our pages are spidered. Any thoughts?

Regards,

Joel

[ARTzWeb.net]

I could say that I am getting more referrals from msn than I used to. However I used to have 1-2 hits a month and now I have 4 (what a change )

Google on the other hand, has been getting me more than 200 hits a day, which I find great. Hits from yahoo are a bit on the increase as well. But generally speaking, I think your best bet is Google. Although I get more than 600-800 uniques a day, only hits from google have turned into actual customers.

Google has the majority of the web searchers in any country. Nomatter how big the hype on the media is about msn, I think they won't be able to get such a big chunk of web searchers. Also I don't think msn provides any better results than google, which will still make them the no1 search engine.

Ian J, regarding the duplicated content problem you mention, have tried to tell them numerous times, but it hasn't changed anything. I think that all search engines will need to develop a "next generation" search engine. The model they use now was good back in 1990 or 1991 in the graphicless days of the Internet. I find it very rare to find what I am looking for with the first attempt (unless I search about microsoft or dell).