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Rx8 IIUM
by Ahmad Syahmi Abd Shukor
MSN Search is the search engine for the MSN portal site. It was also a search engine by Microsoft that comprised a search engine, index, and web crawler. For years it had used databases from other vendors including LookSmart, Inktomi and Direct Hit. It started using its own unique database since February 1 2005.
Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own self-built search engine results, the index of which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. In November 2004, the upgrade started as a beta program and came out of beta in February 2005. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch and the service also began to provide its search results to other search portals in an effort to better compete in the market.
Windows Live Search
The first public beta of Windows Live Search was launched on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 This is done in order to replace MSN Search. The new search engine used search tabs which include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local and so on.
1. Daily changing of background image.
2. Left side navigation pane.
3. Sublinks. On certain search results, the search result page also shows section links within the article
4. Video thumbnail Preview where, by hovering over a video thumbnail, the video automatically starts playing
5. Image search with continuous scrolling images
6. Instant answers eg. sport, finance, math, package tracking and tracing, ditionary, spell check, shopping, health infomation and many more.
Databases: MSN Search uses its own Web database and also has separate News, Images, and Local databases along with links into Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia content. Text ads, currently from Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions (formerly known as Overture).
Strengths:
* Large, unique database
* Query building "Search Builder" and Boolean searching
* Cached copies of Web pages including date cached
* Automatic local search options.
Limitation:
- Site/Domain: Searches can be limited by location/domain or can exclude a specific domain.
- Location: MSN can limit by country and/or region.
- File Type: Limits results to specific file types: HTML, PDF, PowerPoint, Word, or Excel.
- Language Limits: 12 language limits as of March 2005
Sorting: Results are sorted by relevance. The Search Builder Results Ranking section has three sliders that users can adjust to change the ranking. The three sliders are for updated recently vs. static, very popular vs. less popular, and approximate match vs. exact match.
The display includes the title, a brief keyword-in-context (KWIC) display, the URL, and a link to the cached copy of the page.
A date is displayed to the right of the cache link when that page has been updated in the MSN database recently. MSN Search displays 10, 15, 30 or 50 records at a time, by default through the settings. By default, it shows only two results per site, but in the settings under Group Results from the Same Site, it can be turn off or changed to one or three. However, on many searches, especially when set to only one result per site and with only 10 results at a time, there is no "Show more results from . . . " link to see the additional results from a specific site.
References:
http://specials.msn.com/MSNHelp_Preview.aspx
http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/msn/review.html
http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/newsarchive/cat_msn_search.shtml
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