Healthy Future for Vertical Search Engines? - Checking out MSN
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Finally, I used MSN’s resource. The site displayed the link to Health & Fitness prominently near the top, along with about 30 others. The portal-like site included a link labeled “Breast Cancer Awareness.” As with Yahoo, it took me to a breast cancer portal with an assortment of relevant articles, news items, message boards, and other information. When you encounter these kinds of portals, it’s very easy to spend far more time on them than you intended, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
A search of MSN’s Health & Fitness site for breast cancer returns the now-familiar two sponsored links at the top and a column of sponsored links on the right. Above the sponsored links on the right, though, is a list of related searches containing the phrase “breast cancer.” Unlike Yahoo, MSN’s search makes it clear where you’re going for each site.
So how does MSN Health & Fitness do for “BRCA testing”? Once again, there are two sponsored links at the top; on the right, before the ads, MSN lists the related search “BRCA Genetic Testing.” Clicking on that link delivers organic results without the ads at the top. The results were similar, but not identical. Going back to my original BRCA testing query, I noticed two links at the top sitting next to the number of results returned (“Page 1 of 42,279 results”): Options and Advanced. Clicking on options let me adjust some of the settings in ways that are pretty standard for a search engine, and one that I hadn’t expected: location. Mine was set to Atlanta, Georgia, for some reason, so I adjusted it for my actual location. In this case, it didn’t change my results.
The Advanced link popped up a window that provided a variety of options. I could set my search parameters more precisely as to what search terms must (or must not) be included, find or exclude web pages from particular sites or domains, find web pages that link to specific URLs, find web pages from specific countries or regions, and find web pages written in a specific language.
There was one last factor I could include, which bears a little explaining. It’s called results ranking. MSN shows you three bars with sliders on them. By default, they’re all set to the middle. The first bar lets you decide whether you want to see results that are more static or that have been updated more recently. The second bar lets you weight your results toward more or less popular sites. The third bar lets you slide anywhere between an “approximate match” and an “exact match.” The scales go numerically from one to 100. I left the middle indicator the same, but adjusted the others to “more recent” and “exact match.” This not only brought about a serious reordering of my results, but also changed the sponsored links.
Okay, so what about the search on ACL? Well, that’s where I discovered that MSN Health & Fitness is almost just a gloss over Microsoft’s regular search engine. It returned two sponsored links at the top which I honestly couldn’t tell whether they were relevant; the natural results were no more relevant than Google’s. On the other hand, in the column to the right under related searches, it offered eight options, of which six were relevant. Clicking on any of those not only turned up relevant organic results, but also brought up even more relevant related searches as options on the right.
The three major search engines seem to have delivered good results for what is, admittedly, probably not the most taxing query I could have given them. The performance for the more specific queries varied a little more, however. So how can the specialized search engines improve on this? You don’t know what you’re missing until you try it, so in the next part we’ll take a look at the other options.
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