If you've been living under a rock for the last 2 days, you might not have known that Microsoft has finally loaded its cannons and sent a shot across Google's bow in the impending search wars. They've put up a beta of their MSN Search at http://beta.search.msn.com. Now before I say anything else, here's a standard disclaimer - its still in beta, so do not judge this product now. Its final version might be very different and vastly improved. But having said that, let me launch in...
If this beta is any indication of Microsoft's attempts at winning the search war, then Larry and Sergey would be partying right now. MSN Search (beta) is a poor attempt at search. Frankly, I have no idea why they even released it as of now - it seems more like a techpreview than a polished beta. And personally, I find the new MSN search blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch) too corporate-ish. But they've just started - so they deserve a chance to explain. And boy oh boy..do they have some explaining to do. Let's start off shall we?
I'm not going to cover all the features - other bloggers have done far better jobs at this, such as
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/001360.html
http://journals.tuxreports.com/lch/archives/002140.html
The leaked UI I had linked to a couple of weeks back was right - I see the same UI here.
When I read about this, I headed right on over to the site. Slashdot still hadn't caught the story - so the site was snappy to load. Err..but that was the only thing that was snappy about it. Every search I tried threw up a "service unavailable' error and judging by the comments on the MSN Search blog, almost every other person in the comments was hit by the same problem. And there was no response from the MSN Search bloggers on the comments page either at the time of writing this. Oh well - not really an auspicious beginning. But since they are in beta, I guess they can be forgiven for this - which seems to be some sort of scalability issue.
Page snippets
I always thought of Microsoft as a very innovative company. But MSN Search reeks of Google all over, from the cached page right down to the site: operator. The way they generate snippets is very similar too - with the search results in bold etc. But where MSN search falls flat is in the way it generates the titles (the links you click on in the search result). I examined how Google does this and my half-baked attempt at a search engine (read my earlier posts) generate way better titles than MSN search does. Maybe if someone from MSN Search is reading this, they can take a look at my source code - for my 5 lines of code which any newbie can write is way better than whatever they have now to figure out the titles of pages. Maybe they have some super-smart logic which I can't see here - but that remains to be seen.
Search builder
The new search builder is a bit..err..clunky.The UI could use some work. And I'm not impressed with the accuracy of its results.For example, if I indulge in some vanity searching and search for 'Sriram Krishnan',my blog comes up first. However, if I choose 'India' as the location and search for 'sriram krishnan loc:IN', my blog is nowhere on the first page. In fact,the first link is from Indiana University! Its not as if I haven't mentioned 'India' enough times on my blog. I would like to get convinced that this location search is something more than just grepping through the results for the country.
I would like to test this out more - but the site is giving me too many error messages for me to perceive.
To the MSN search team - come on guys! The whole world was waiting for this -and if this is your best effort, Google is going to give you the hiding of a lifetime.
On the other hand, I've heard great reviews of the upcoming Microsoft Desktop search tool from people who've seen it inside Microsoft.From what I've heard, it seems to fix a lot of the grievances I had with Google desktop search.