MSN Search

As you will probably have heard, Microsoft revealed a beta of their new search engine, which you can view in action at beta.search.msn.com. I felt that the internet needed some more opinions, so here are mine.

First of all, the design.

Design

After the established old guard of search engines — Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, et al — decided to bloat their pages out into useless portals, Google set the standard and gave us all what we really wanted and — more importantly — what we really needed. That was a plain page with a search box and a search button on it. We didn’t want to be told what the weather was in five different parts of the world, or told what we could buy from various American retailers, or hear about the latest news with headlines syndicated from CNN.com, and we certainly didn’t want to be urged to slap the monkey. So, any new search engine has to bear that history in mind.

As MSN Search is still a beta service, its design will no doubt change over time, so I’ve taken a screenshot. At the time of writing, it looks like this in Opera 7.54:

It’s not bad, but it’s not great. While I can appreciate the need to differentiate MSN Search from Google, I think they’ve not spent enough time on this, or even hired a qualified designer. It shares certain design elements from Windows XP, particularly the XP login screen with the blue/white gradient and green search button, but what struck me immediately was that the gradient was in the wrong place — with all of the search elements gathered in the bottom-left corner, placing the focal point of the gradient in the centre means my eyes are drawn immediately to the word ‘beta’, and not the actual search field. That said, I am a sucker for overlarge headers on websites, so it gains points there. Attractive but poorly implemented.

The search elements themselves are not spaced apart enough, which gives the most important part of the page a very cramped, claustrophobic feel. The three links above the search field really ought to be tabs, to better indicate whether you’re currently performing a web, news or image search (Google also falls foul of this), and I’d like to see more space between the search field and the search button. I’ve no problem with the positioning of the links beneath the search field, but I do wonder why the ability to change your language to Spanish is given such prominence, when you can select from several languages after following the Settings link.

The actual search results pages are nice. Again, I expect these to change, so this is what they look like at the time of writing:

It makes a nice change from Google’s whiteout, and the blue header background provides clear differentiation between search results and the search engine itself. Other than that, there’s not much you can do with a page of search results, so what we see here is fairly typical, with a link to the page, a brief extract, the link itself and a link to a cached copy. There’s fewer adverts than Google, with just one sponsored ad at the top of the results and one at the bottom, and they’re unobtrusive. You don’t have the sidebar of Google AdSense adverts so the majority of the page is just taken up by the results. Hard to go wrong there.

Finally, it uses near-valid XHTML and CSS for layout and design, which can only be a good thing, and it’s always nice to see a big-name player going down this route.

Functionality

The functionality of the basic search is fine — just type, then click search. Atypically, there’s no ‘Advanced Search’ option. Instead, there’s a ‘Search Builder’, which does much what you’d expect an Advanced Search option to do, just in a slightly different way. What you get for your money is a drop-down box attached to the main box, with a tabbed list of advanced search options. A search term field allows you to select between the usual ‘all, any, exact, none’ options, there’s a separate panel for excluding or restricting the domains of the search, you can select country/region-specific results, or results in a specific language, and you can find webpages that link to a particular URL.

You can control the ranking of the results with three graphical sliders, which is a nice idea, but it won’t work — in fact, you can’t even look at it — without JavaScript, so it’s not accessible, and it was a little buggy in Opera. I’m not convinced that there will be many people who will even spend much time even using them — if your search is relying on you to start nudging sliders about to fine-tune the results, then it’s probably time to look at a different engine entirely. The search builder is about as powerful as any other advanced search, so it remains to be seen whether the unusual means of presenting this power attracts people, or puts them off.

The functionality of the search results page is again mostly fine. Annoyingly, you can’t return to the front page by clicking the site logo, and I know that you don’t really need to do that what with all the tools available on every page, but convention dictates, and it wouldn’t have hurt.

The cached pages lack Google’s feature of highlighting search terms on the cached page. Also missing is the definition link that Google provides to dictionary.com. These are two incredibly useful features and there’s no real reason to not implement them, so I assume that either they’ll turn up in a later version of MSN Search, or were left out for fear of being too Google-like and as such will not appear.

It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.

Design and functionality are important, but can it actually find anything? It’s hard to judge without using it as my regular search engine for a while. The instinct is to simply search for something on Google and compare the results with that, but that’s a bit of a misnomer — simply not having identical results to Google doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. It’s quite likely that MSN results are currently more accurate in some ways than Google; I’ve been aware that this very site scores quite highly in Google for various searches, but it gets a lot of its pagerank from being linked to from a large number of out-of-date Litestep websites. With a cache that’s obviously been built more recently, MSN Search provides me with a rather more humbling picture of this site’s current popularity, in that it only even shows up at all on a search for my name if I perform the search in Spanish, oddly.

A test of the image search looking for pictures of Devendra Banhart returned no results, where Google Image Search returns 215 matches. Similarly, a search for ‘Tux’ resulted in 8,919 and 66,200 respectively, while a search for “Bill Gates” weighed in at 1,472 and 14,500. Obviously, nobody needs 66,000 pictures of that stupid Linux penguin — one is already too many — but it does demonstrate which engine is ahead.

MSN Search lacks the ability to search Google Groups (understandably, and it does serve to remind us that Google has sole access to the Usenet archive right now), but both have a News option. Not many people in the news seem to be talking about Banhart, but nevertheless, Google managed 17 results compared to MSN’s 8. For the search news terms ‘Tux’ and ‘Bill Gates’, the scores were 240/37 and 1,700/501 respectively, Google again soundly trumping MSN Search.

Some trust issues.

Only time is going to tell if MSN Search can provide more accurate results than Google, which ultimately will be the only reason people switch. MSN Search indexes about 5 million pages and the service is still in beta so no doubt results will improve as time goes on. At the moment, Google demonstrably has the bigger cache, and also doesn’t have the trust issues that people have towards Microsoft. Also, people will be more forgiving towards Google — it has a strong brand loyalty that Microsoft will find hard to overcome, without relying on bundling some form of MSN Search with future versions of Windows.

• Tweet
• Share on Tumblr