What is the quality of MSN's search engine like? Does it rival that of Google?
Indeed, Microsoft does have the resources to create a very powerful product, but that is often not what is done, as shown by many of their past products.
Then again, I'll use whatever search engine returns the best results, regardless of what prizes they might be offering searchers. The prizes would have to be pretty significant for me to want to put up with what may be lower-quality searches.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Thursday February 16, 2006 @11:06PM (#14739288)
MSN search is doing much better nowadays. When I'm really researching stuff, I tend to search both Google and MSN and compare the results. Although Google remains my primary search choice, I am finding myself using MSN more and more.
As a general rule of thumb, the top search result on MSN normally sucks, which tends to give you the immediate impression that the search engine is lacking, but if you look past that, it gets better quick. To my experience, MSN Search will normally contain the responses of the first page of Google's search across its first two pages of search results. Filling in the rest of those first two pages is normally about 50% useless pages, and 50% pages that are actually quite good matches that Google doesn't list until many pages later. When search for products, you'll find that companies tend to play games with Google's search results, and as such, MSN's can often be better. When searching for time sensitive items, Google seems much more responsive, which is both good and bad. Clearly, the responsiveness can be good when the thing you are searching for is very fresh, but at the same time, current events can often heavily skew what you would consider to be the expected results. For instance, if you search for "thyroid cancer", you would expect your first page to be lists of medical encyclopedia's, maybe a support group or two. However, if the day before some famous actor or musician announced they had thyroid cancer, the first page of Google's results has a tendency to be skewed towards that news.
MSN search also answers direct questions more consistently. On occasion, Google can give you some Answer blocks that are just plain wrong. In my experience, I haven't ever gotten an answer block from MSN that has been incorrect factually.
On the other hand, its kinda fun to search for Microsoft products on MSN search. The top result is NEVER the official website. On Google, it basically always is, which I would consider the proper result, but like I said, the top result in MSN is almost always crap.
I'd say once MSN manages to purge about 20% of their crap results, they might become my search engine of choice.
What is the quality of MSN's search like? (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, Microsoft does have the resources to create a very powerful product, but that is often not what is done, as shown by many of their past products.
Then again, I'll use whatever search engine returns the best results, regardless of what prizes they might be offering searchers. The prizes would have to be pretty significant for me to want to put up with what may be lower-quality searches.
Re:What is the quality of MSN's search like? (Score:2, Interesting)
As a general rule of thumb, the top search result on MSN normally sucks, which tends to give you the immediate impression that the search engine is lacking, but if you look past that, it gets better quick. To my experience, MSN Search will normally contain the responses of the first page of Google's search across its first two pages of search results. Filling in the rest of those first two pages is normally about 50% useless pages, and 50% pages that are actually quite good matches that Google doesn't list until many pages later. When search for products, you'll find that companies tend to play games with Google's search results, and as such, MSN's can often be better. When searching for time sensitive items, Google seems much more responsive, which is both good and bad. Clearly, the responsiveness can be good when the thing you are searching for is very fresh, but at the same time, current events can often heavily skew what you would consider to be the expected results. For instance, if you search for "thyroid cancer", you would expect your first page to be lists of medical encyclopedia's, maybe a support group or two. However, if the day before some famous actor or musician announced they had thyroid cancer, the first page of Google's results has a tendency to be skewed towards that news.
MSN search also answers direct questions more consistently. On occasion, Google can give you some Answer blocks that are just plain wrong. In my experience, I haven't ever gotten an answer block from MSN that has been incorrect factually.
On the other hand, its kinda fun to search for Microsoft products on MSN search. The top result is NEVER the official website. On Google, it basically always is, which I would consider the proper result, but like I said, the top result in MSN is almost always crap.
I'd say once MSN manages to purge about 20% of their crap results, they might become my search engine of choice.