Fun Things to Try with MSN Search
I’m still pretty set in my ways. I’m still in love with Google, but I feel it is only fair to give the new MSN search engine an honest try. If you want to follow along click here to open up a new window for MSN search.
So far, everything looks pretty normal. Then I noticed a little box underneath the search bar called “Search Builder.” I clicked on it, and to my surprise I was pleasantly rewarded. A new menu opens up with options to create a search tailored to you. The Search Builder menu defaults to a “Search Terms” tab that allows you to choose terms that you want to exclude or include. The “Site/Domain” tab set up searched within a domain or excludes a particular domain. The “Links To” tab allows you to do a backlink search. The next tab “Country/Region” helps determine a geographic region for your search. Combine that with the following tab, “Language,” and you can create interesting searches. Now, none of this seems ground breaking to the people in the SEO world, but for the average user who rarely does little more then type in a phrase, this is big step in the world of search.
The final tab, I found the most interesting: “Results Ranking.” This tab allows you to play with MSN’s algorithm to get results tailored to your desires. If you want fresh data, you can specify that along with importance of link popularity and how closely your phrase matches what is on the page. This is a great tool to help create an online marketing campaign. By adjusting the different bars, you get to see how MSN views your site. You could use the popularity bar in conjunction with your keywords to figure out how aggressive of a link campaign is needed. You can play with the freshness bar to see what people are writing about your keyphrase and try to implement a blog to maintain your freshness.
All in all the basic search features seemed pretty good. I don’t know yet if I like the results I get, but I like having the flexibility of engineering a search around my needs. MSN been heavily promoting their new engine and I’m excited to see where their engine goes. Will Google be strong enough to outlast new engines, or will I be MSN’ing my searches in the years to come?