MSN Search: Learning Lessons
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Microsoft improved its MSN Search engine by, among other things, listening to its customers and making sure it was returning relevant results. Listening to customers and becoming more relevant will become even more dominant themes as we look to the future of online search.
Microsoft took the wraps off its new, improved MSN Search in February of 2005, amid much ballyhoo. The new version was supposed to offer more precise, more powerful results for visitors eager to find answers. But does it really deliver on its promise? First, let’s examine what it is supposed to include.
For one thing, while the search engine does index the Web, it also calls on some resources a little closer to home to answer certain questions. Microsoft Encarta, the company’s encyclopedia, provides answers to questions relating to geographical locations, historical and popular figures, definitions, facts, calculations, conversions and solutions to equations. And yes, as with Ask Jeeves, you really can type in a question and get an answer. For example, the question “Where is Zimbabwe?” yielded this result, which appeared at the top before any search listing: “Zimbabwe: location: Zimbabwe is located in southern Africa and is bordered by Mozambique to the east, Botswana to the west, South Africa to the south, and Zambia to the north.”
For music lovers trying to locate music clips, MSN Search also pulls information from MSN Music. Users should be able to type the name of a recording artist, song or album into MSN Search and automatically get links to music files and other content from MSN Music. Indeed, at the very top of the results for “Stevie Wonder,” I could click on a link to MSN Music that took me to a page with more links to all his songs, for purchase and download. Of course, it reacted a little differently to more obscure performers; while it turned up many links related to Leslie Fish, one of my favorite songwriters, MSN Music had apparently never heard of her (and given that a verse from one of her songs appeared in a book about Pretty Good Privacy, which is open source software, it might be just as well).
MSN Search boasts a library of more than 400 million images. I tried for something relatively obscure: sage blossoms (after all, it is the leaves of the plant that are mostly used for cooking; I’ve never seen a sage blossom in real life). The search engine found an excellent color image of a blooming sage from somebody’s blog. For those of you more interested in gadgetry, it also found two pages of images of DDR2 memory.
The Search Builder tool is immensely cool. It lets you control not only what phrases are searched for, but what site(s) or URLs are searched (or excluded), what country or region the site is hosted in, what language, and other variables. Sliding bars let you control such search factors as how frequently the site is updated (freshness), how popular the site is, and whether your keywords or key phrases match exactly or approximately. That kind of fine control was nearly impossible to achieve in the early days of Internet search.
The “Search Near Me” tool can leave a little to be desired if you’re looking for something obscure, though perhaps it wasn’t the fault of the search engine in this case. I searched for a relatively unusual item (inkle looms) that I knew was sold by a dealer within 100 miles. The first merchant returned was located in Texas; the second, North Carolina. Neither of those are within 100 miles of South Florida, my own location.
For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that MSN Search offers downloadable desktop and email searching, though the email search looks as if it only works with Outlook.
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