Another saga of a software released too early!
The objective was to take MSN Search Beta through some simple queries and find where it currently stands versus Google and more importantly by itself.
The strategy was simple. I decided to find out sites which link to http://blog.taragana.com/.
I did a search on MSN Search Beta - http://beta.search.msn.com/
It consistently showed me 327 links to my Blog site ( http://blog.taragana.com ).
Then I went for the second page. The links to other pages are found at the bottom right corner of the screen (only for the first page, for other pages it is also at the top right corner of the screen).
As the first page showed me 1-8 links, I expected 9-16 links to be shown on page 2. However it showed me 11-20 links. Where are links 9 & 10? It also shows I have one more page of links ( page 6 ) compared to page 1.
What I don’t understand is how can it display 327 links in only 5-6 pages, displaying only 8-10 links per page!
Note that it is still showing that 327 links are available.
Now we venture into page 3.
Page 3 suddenly decided to reduce the total number of links to 26! What happened to the glorious 301 (327 - 26) additional links?
Note: These results were consistent at the time of testing.
Now I went back to page 2 and decided to click on page 4. It showed an error. Same results were obtained with page 5 and 6. The error message is interesting.
Now I tried a variation of the query. I typed blog.taragana.com instead of http://blog.taragana.com/. This query works fine with Google.
I surely wasn’t expecting this! Apparently the engine had thrown an exception and some developer decided to print a cute message.
Now I tried to find all pages containing Microsoft. Interestingly it displayed 9 links on the first page. For any other query I tested it with it always prints 8 links.
Next I tried to search for sun.
The first entry read:
Sun Microsystems
Developer of the Java language offers information on new products, and update information on existing ones.
That is surprising! Sun is primarily a hardware company. I wouldn’t have expected them to tout about Java and furthermore with such a lame description! I searched the text of http://www.sun.com/. I couldn’t find anywhere the above description. How is Microsoft getting it? The only explanation is that it is cooking up descriptions written by lame writers (intentional?).
The description for Oracle is even more amusing.
Oracle Corporation
Silicon Valley software giant supplies applications for enterprise information management. Features demos and upgrade downloads.
I can assure you Oracle haven’t described themselves as “Silicon Valley software giant” anywhere on their page.
In Google I could actually find 320 valid links to the site. I checked them and they looked fine.
This is clearly a beta product and lot needs to be improved upon. And hence a comparison may be like comparing apples to oranges.
However as it stands it is not even a hundred mile near Google or even other search engines like Altavista or even Lycos, not to mention the usual fare of defects!
Somehow it is apparently trying to display similar number of result count as Google on its front page, however in reality it doesn’t have anywhere near as many pages.
There is a critical reliability issue as it apparently cooks up site descriptions instead of using automated process to extract it from the pages for many sites (competitors?). Most likely it is a hybrid process where site descriptions are cooked up only for targeted sites like Sun or Oracle. And its automatic descriptions are way inaccurate compared to Google and often doesn’t describe the context at all. It definitely has no special understanding about blogs either. The customization of search is of concern as MSN search engine is apparently trying to be much more than just a search engine. It is apparently trying to force-feed users its own concept of other companies in the guise of search engine results.
More investigation on these issues is called for.