MSN Beta Search problems?

The new beta MSN Search site has launched.

I had a quick look. Here's my take on the beta.

  • The site seems 'Temporarily Unavailable' quite often.
  • It's is slow. I mean dog slow. Some results took around half a minute to come back. If MSN Search is to surpass Google (Steve Ballmer's words, not mine..), it should at least return results as quickly as Google does.
  • Quality of results is dubious. Search for 'ASP.NET' - and you'll only get one result - you guessed it, Microsoft's ASP.NET site. That's just silly.

Having said all that, I realize that this is a beta version. But surely if people are meant to take MSN Search seriously, this beta needs to meet a certain level of quality and performance criteria. At the moment, it just sucks pretty bad for the reasons mentioned above.

What do you think?

5 Comments

  • Search ASP.Net in google and you only get 1 result...

  • I think that's because it's searching for the website "www.asp.net" and not the term "asp.net". Search for "asp.net" (with quotes) and you find more matches.



    I'm really curious to hear what MSN Search runs on. Is it all managed C#/C++? It sure would be a big boost in credibility if they could have a scalable, performant search engine on par with Google using .Net.

  • > The site seems 'Temporarily Unavailable' quite often



    I'm just getting that all the time now. Tried the site several times between 13:00 GMT and 15:00 GMT, same response every time.



    Doesn't look like they quite expected to be launching today.

  • I'm not seeing any of the 'Temporarily Unavailable' messages.



    The spider is probably still workin on pulling in content too, I saw it hit my site a couple of days ago. Google's spider obviously has a two year head start on spidering ;-)

  • Yeah, google only shows one result for ASP.NET. You can also try ASN .NET (with a space) and you get 7,612,937 sites returned (in 0.07 seconds, as opposed to google's 0.31 seconds - though that's a pretty arbitrary comparison, I doubt as many people are using msn search as were using google at the same time when I did the search).



    Haven't seen any "Temporarily Unavailable" messages, but this is beta, so they may be uploading fixes or whatever every now and then.

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