I used the MSN search today and here are the things I liked to point out.

MSN search does not seem to give high preference to domain names while most of the other search engines do. For eg. Searching for a non-english keyword trap17 should have resulted in trap17.com in the first place but instead more preference was given to another websites which were linking to trap17.
This could had been fine with some other keywords which had some meaning in english language, however this point was like one of the most downside of msn. Because, most of the msn searches are triggered by the web browser itself ( internet explorer ) and many a times, mistyped domain names or keywords should be searched for and corresponding domain names should be returned.

This also has negative effects. There are many domain names which correspond to commonly used search keywords. Like free web hosting, I think there are more than 50 sites whose domains have these words in it. But, in such cases msn can do an advanced filtering to see which domain actually has a lot of info regarding the keywords and it can return the results.

Second flaw, The search results are not sorted in page numbers so if you are going to find search more and more pages, you will have to rely on the Back and Next search links. That is rather crappy.

Third, It takes a very long time before your site appears in MSN search. I really hate this fact. Google includes any site with in a week and starts showing its indexed contect within a month or two. While most of the search engines including msn take about 6-7 months. I dont know. wtf takes them such a long time. I hope the new msn search will take pretty less time to index sites.

Also, the web site description returned by msn search is simply extracted from the title tags which may be good in some cases but most of the people ( when using frontpage ) forget to put that . And I saw some pages with descriptions of no more than 3 words. While the best way for extracting description would be get the highest keyword which occurs throughout the page and then extract a text of about 100 words which includes that keyword. I had used this method when I had created a search engine in perl ( a text file driven Search :-).

MSN search definately requires a lot of improvement.

Please post your suggestions and comments . ...

I think MSN concentrate to much on advertising. They have copied google by putting the sponsored links on the side (or did google copy MSN?) which is ok i don't mind that, but then they have some of the same links in the main search. I agree that some serious improvment is needed. One of the only things I do like about MSN search is that they have taken out the necessity of going to more than one page to search a range of things like encyclopedia, dictionary or just the web.

about the extracted results from title. google also have this, but it's not a bug to google. its a wierd features. and about key words any search engine have this failure but it's not thier fault, may be sometimes faulty. but it is becuase of unprofessional web masters that to enthusiasm to gain visitors

Like most other MS products, this damn thing also SUCKS.

As rightly pointed out by OpaQue, it take them >=6 months to add new site to their list of sites. I had submitted my site 7 months back ; and now atlast, they have included my site in their searches ........... but by now my host "anyxhost.com" went out of bussiness ................ so my site is of no use now.

Instead of trying to copy GOOGLE, they should try to improve the internal searching features of Windows.

Who cares? Is there anybody who actually uses MSN Search? Everybody knows Google is far more superiour.

MSN Search pollutes the web, they use far too agressive ways of spreading it around, like including it in their MSN Messenger, making things install the MSN Search Bar by default; making it search with it when you type something in the IE Address Bar, and it's absolutely unaffordable to have a search engine like that, and put Ads on it the way they do. Esp the popups etc. MSN is the purest evil ever to be spawned by a big company, like Microsoft.

Yeah lhunath,
The obtrusive way MSN advertises is really bad. Worst of all is the fact that it is installed as default with MS OS.
As I've told earlier, MS really SUCKS. Have any one of you ever seen a good MS product ? (if so please let me know and I'll tell you what sucks about it).
It's time that we stop being fooled by Billy and his Silly products.
Bye,
Bigyan

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise

Never had a chance of trying out WIN 2003 SERVER, my machine is too slow for it. However I'll definitely try it out and post my experiances soon.

Bye,
Bigyan

Notepad. Nice and simple, even Microsoft didn't go wrong on that one .

i agree