msn search beta - working now
Ok, the new msn search is working okay this morning. I haven't noticed any US bloggers commenting on it being unavailable yesterday, so perhaps it got working again by the time they hit the office.
It's running fast and looking fine. I ran a couple of search terms that I run on Google from time to time, and got a longer set of results. Also ordered slightly differently. Better results? Too early to say.
The tuning feature looks interesting: hit Search Builder|Results ranking - you can prioritise/deprioritise the accuracy of the match, the popularity of the results and the freshness of the results. I can imagine that this would be useful when struggling with large result sets. We'll see.
Perhaps it's time for a sea change on my desktop - a move from IE + Google to Firefox + MSN Search. Yes, I know it's a weird mix, but then I've never cared about the whole MS is good/MS is bad thing. I just like products that work. Strange, eh?