MSN will launch their MSN Search Service in 25 markets and 10 languages worldwide, today.

The MSN Search engine has been in public beta testing since November 2004. The MSN Search team have been gathering feedback from a variety of different users in order to release their finely tuned search engine.

Through gathering this feedback the MSN Search team have been listening to customers throughout the whole development process. The end result is a search engine that allows customers to search specific tailored queries for their own needs. MSN Search allows users to search the Web, news, images, music, desktop and Microsoft Encarta. Users can query the search engine and receive more than 1.5 million answers from Encarta. Users can also type the name of an artist, song or album into MSN Search and get links to information on those songs and sample music. In indexing results for their search engine, MSN have Search bots that index daily or weekly to ensure results are accurate and up to date.

In a statement to associated press, Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of the MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform division at Microsoft said “We’re committed to continuous improvement in the speed, precision and ease of use of our search service ... this built-from-the-ground-up version of MSN Search provides an infrastructure that enables us to rapidly innovate and give consumers precisely the information they’re looking for, no matter where it’s located"

MSN Search users can also use search tools that give them more control over how and where they search for information. Search builder allows people to extensively customize searches by emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain search criteria — such as a specific site or domain, country or region, or language — via a menu of adjustable onscreen dials. Search near me offers users the ability to tailor their search results to a specific geographic location to ensure results relevant to where they are or where they want to go.

Along with today's announcement, MSN have also released an updated Desktop Search Beta. The new version of the Toolbar Suite fixes several bugs, stability and robustness issues and has fixed the virus pop ups problem.

MSN is planning to promote their newly launched search engine with TV adverts, web adverts and in magazines across the United States.

Sounds good for MSN but are they too late? Has google already become to much of a household name for anyone new to be able to get a start?

Sounds pretty good for MSN.



Sample test:
52,885,958 containing joe - 0.15 sec. --msn
56,700,000 for joe - 0.08 sec. --google
43,600,000 for joe - 0.14 sec.--yahoo

So it returns more results than yahoo, but is slower. Google reigns supreme with search results AND speed. But seems like msn is not that far off. Interesting to see what Microsoft will come up with next, now that it has entered the search engines market.

Google stays the best search engine nonetheless. It's becomming also a threat for msn hotmail, with it's newest branch, gmail, which is far much user-friendly then the old hotmail.

IT is simply a bit awkward to type http://search.msn.com

Trying Google.com is kinda fast and easy. And my hands have now got addicated. When I want to search somethign, i simply type

google "My Search keywords"

in firefox. so Msn has a long journey to cover up. However, the amount of traffic, I am getting from MSN has increased a lot. But the PRIME source of our visitors still remains google.

Google is most definitely the most popular search engine and it will stay that way. No-one can keep up, MSN isn't even second, Yahoo is.
I agree with OpaQue as www.google.com is very easy to type and you get used to put. So is yahoo, as its easy to type, but isn't first as it doesn't have as many websites in its directory. It all depends on the name to be honest.

Google has the greates budget as for now and their stocks increase in price every day, so if they do not come out with something incredible.. those stocks might drop down as they were decreasing before.

P.S I think they will advance their earth-google project

There is a new search that will soon replace msn's search.
The site is still a beta, but it is great nontheless.
You can visit at www.live.com

Well its good to see MSN working hard to counter Google. As of now it seems quite impossible that MSN will ever replace google.
Well but when Google started, it too was dealing with something already mastered by Yahoo, Altavista etc.

You never know, maybe MSN turns up with some new concept that may make MSN a more worthy option. I think they should do a tight integration of MSN with their operating system. They already capture the base of every computer i.e. the OS. Using that, they can conquer every other domain.
Let's see where MSN gets and what Google does...

These days MS is putting a lot of attention to Human Computer interface. I bet their next project will be something in relation to a Natural Language interface to applications.