Microsoft is looking to sway you away from Google and Yahoo! in favor of their own new search engine: MSN Search. Although the full version of its search software won’t be available until next year, MSN Search in beta form was released on November 11. MSN Search plans to offer searches that are more customizable, allowing the user to specify the range of relevancy of the search results, as well as the ability to limit results to a geographic region.
MSN Search will also attempt to outdo its competition by answering questions typed into its search field. For instance, a search for “What is the tallest mountain?” returns the correct answer of Mount Everest, including some relevant links and information, all in addition to the regular search results which appear below. MSN Search also wished to enjoy having the largest searchable index, with results coming from a search of over five billion documents, trumping Google’s 4.2 billion.
However, with the news of MSN Search’s beta release, Google decided to announce that it had nearly doubled its search index, to bring it to a total of over 8 billion searchable pages. “Now when I search for friends who previously generated only a handful of results, I see double that number. These are not just copies of the same pages, but truly diverse results that give more information,” says Bill Coughran, V.P. of engineering at Google.
Will Microsoft manage to sway Google users to their search engine? My intuition tells me that it’s not very likely. Unless Microsoft can offer something entirely original and innovative, most people will not feel the need to switch. After all, why fix something that isn’t broken?
MSN Search’s beta can be found at http://beta.search.msn.com/, and can currently perform web and image searches. In my own exploration of the customizable features of MSN Search, I found that much of it is either not functioning or is functioning ineffectively. On most searches, no matter what options I set, my search results are mostly the same.
However, Microsoft’s advantage in the competition for internet traffic may be its ability to tie in all of Microsoft’s already existent services into MSN Search. For instance, a search for my favorite band, “Reel Big Fish,” returns a special result that links me to MSN Music, where I can preview some of their hit songs, or pay to download any of their albums. A search for “nine feet in yards” tells me that “9 feet = 3 yards,” and I can get access to Microsoft Encarta’s chart of “Imperial and Metric Conversion Factors” by clicking the associated link. With tie-in’s such as these between MSN Music, Microsoft Encarta, and potentially thousands of other up-and-running Microsoft services, MSN Search may become the all-in-one solution to outdo its competition.
MSN Search plans, it seems, to follow along the beaten path of Google’s success. Its interface is strikingly similar, even down to the look and feel of its image search. And as Google beta tests its Google Desktop Search Tool, Microsoft plans to release similar software in December.
Microsoft is working very hard to create the ultimate customizable search engine. Will their efforts be enough to convince loyal Google and Yahoo! users to switch? This will be seen sometime in or after 2005, when work on MSN Search is completed.
