So I hear that MSN Search's following is falling, dropping its share of all searches from 14% to 11% during the month of March, while Google increased a couple of points to almost 50%.
From my own personal experience I think there's a few reasons why MSN search isn't as widely used as Google.
1. It's uglier. The font used for the search results is larger and just isn't as pleasing on the eye as Google's. Neither is the combination of green, orange and blue. It just looks tackier if you ask me. I find the font just distracts me from the results, I find it more difficult to locate what it is I'm after on the page. Google's results page is just neater and more well thought out.
2. Google is easy to type. Search.Msn.Com isn't. There are 4 unique letters in google. Search.msn has 8 unique letters. So it takes longer to type, so why bother?
3. The 'Next page' link is much bigger on Google's results. This isn't a biggy, but every time I want to go to the next page on msn's search results it takes a while to locate the page links. They're colorful, big and easy to locate on Google's.
4. Google shows more results in less space. A quick search for 'time' in google presents 5 and a bit results on the screen. The same search for msn gives me 4 results in the same space. Yes I could just scroll, but that's more work so, again, why should I.
5. MSN's results page is centered and doesn't expand properly with the width of the screen. I have a wide-screen laptop, but this doesn't give me anything with msn's search results because it seems to limit the width of the results to 800 pixels and centers it. Why?
6. I only get 5 pages links on the footer of the first page of msn's search results. Google gives me 10 pages. While this might not seem like a biggy because I can just click on page 5 and then get to page 10 on msn... it just makes Google APPEAR to have more results than MSN. The pure size of Google's database, combined with its speed, makes it feel powerful. MSN has all that, it just doesn't present it as well.
Of course nobody of any importance will read this and take notice, but I thought I'd put it out there anyway.