John blogs about the availability of MSN search and mentions that it will take something special before he'll move away from Google. I've been watching MSN Search spider my web sites over the last couple of months and yesterday when I saw the beta announcement, I was thinking exactly the same thing as John. MS are wasting their time, why would anyone use anything other than Google?
24 hours later I'm completely sold.
MSN Search knows what I mean when I type ".NET" (including the dot). INETA is listed in 1st position, Information about Microsoft .NET in 2nd... Now I don't have to limit searches for .NET code examples by language like C# or VB.NET. Sure, with Google you could type ".Net" including the quotes and Google would make sure ".Net" appeared on the result page... but how many web sites are there that include the top-level domain .net? Answer: Too many...
Type "Marcus Mac Innes" (me) and my blog is listed in 1st position. Type that into Google and my aggregated blog on Artima.net is listed first, my blog is actually listed in 5th position. 2nd, 3rd and 4th positions are taken by several of my past posts which appeared on sites like TechEdBloggers.net. Clearly MSN have got the algorithm right!
Type "flight from dublin to london" and as you would expect the national Irish airline AerLingus.com is listed 1st. Type that into Google and I get a host of generic CheapFlights.com equivalents none of which are actually useful for booking a proper flight from dublin to london.
No matter what I enter, I am getting relevant results sets which are more appropriate than Google's results.
As I said above, I'm completely sold and I bet you will be too. Give it a try and let me know what you think...