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MSN Search Engine - Searching for ways to
make Redmond rise again
da
www.searchenginejournal.com
 (...)
MSN released the beta version
of their long awaited proprietary search engine earlier this quarter. Beta
releases are the software world's version of a dress rehearsal. Mistakes
will happen, even in the best productions, and the beta stage is the place
to field-test a product, finding and fixing inevitable problems before the
real, commercial version of the product is introduced. MSN(beta) search has
seen its share of bumps over the past few weeks including a short period
when it appeared the search tool had crashed. Regardless of any minor
mishaps in its first weeks, MSN(beta) Search shows very good results
generated from a database of approximately 5 billion spidered websites it
began compiling over a year ago. While MSN(beta) and the search tool found
at MSN.Com are different search tools delivering very different sets of
results, the results generated by MSN(beta) will eventually replace the
Inktomi based listings shown on MSN.Com. That's when the real fun will begin.
Please note, as other commentators have pointed out, this is a BETA version
and likely to change in coming weeks before the undisclosed live release
date.
When told to build a better
mousetrap, MSN engineers set their goals fairly high and approached the
problem from the most logical point possible. They seem to have looked at
the best ideas everyone else has come up with and tried to incorporate them
into their search tool. The results are better then expected with highly
relevant site listings that have been compared to earlier versions of
Google's index. That makes sense given that MSNBot the beta-search spider
works very much like GoogleBot, looking for many of the same site elements
including incoming links, contextual relationships between linked documents,
and overall site context. MSNBot also seems to be interested in
keyword-enriched titles and seems especially interested in anchor text.
MSNBot, like GoogleBot and
Slurp finds sites for its index by following links from one page to another
within or between sites. The majority of sites in MSN(beta)'s index were
found by MSNBot as it followed links from sites it had already visited. A
check of backlinks, or links recognized by MSNBot as being relevant to a
specific site almost always shows much higher numbers than a similar check
on Google or Yahoo leading us to conclude that, for the time being at least,
MSNBot does not filter links to the same degree as its rivals. In other
words, relevancy does not appear to be as strong a factor with this version
of MSN(beta) than it is with Google, at first glance anyway. One of the
biggest improvements MSN(beta) brags about is its ability to figure out the
context of individual paragraphs found on a page and apply that context as a
"relevancy" factor against pages that might be linked to from that paragraph.
Subsequent paragraphs on the same page might be about totally different
topics without undermining the contextual relevancy of the links found in
the previous paragraph. Google tends to compare relevancy on a page to page
basis, making it more difficult to address a wide ranging topic on one page.
As with Google and Yahoo's
spiders, MSNBot likes well defined and functioning link paths within your
website. Providing a clear and well explained path for MSNBot to follow is
critical to good rankings. The easiest way to accomplish this is to
establish a text-based sitemap page appended to your website and be certain
there is a link to that sitemap page on each of the other pages in your
site. For database driven sites, this can be accomplished by changing the
"footer" attribute on the template that creates the base-pages. There is an
important thing to note here, especially for webmasters of highly dynamic or
commerce driven sites, use static URLs to link to products in your database
and do whatever is necessary to avoid tracking systems that append unique
user IDs to URLs.
This article is not going
to provide a lot of details around these elements as some or even much of
what is written is subject to sudden change (this is a beta version after
all), and the beta version simply hasn't been around long enough to express
reliable ideas in writing yet. Once you have ensured that MSN(beta)'s spider
can travel from one end of your site to another, and has a way into your
site from an outside reference, take a look at the following elements of
your site.
MSNBot seems to really like
the techniques used by SEOs at StepForth. StepForth pays a lot of attention
to keyword enrichment of the basic but critical elements of a site. Assuming
navigation issues have been taken care of, websites that use keyword phrases
in titles, anchor text, and early in the page content are doing very well in
MSN(beta)'s index. We do not know for sure what MSNBot thinks of meta tags
however we recommend using the basic description and keywords meta tags
along with robot exclude text when necessary. MSNBot, basically likes clean
code with good, common sense SEO. In a previous article, we republished the
guidelines MSN posted to the MSN(beta) search site.
MSNBot Guidelines, at a
glance:
* Incoming links from other
websites with keyword-enriched anchor text used to phrase the links
* Easily read code that has been W3C validated
* As with all search engines, best results are found when you only address
one topic per page
* Keep your page site reasonable, 150kb is the maximum size recommended in
the MSN guidelines
* Apply keyword phrases to well written sentences early in the code. Don't
use techniques such as keyword stuffing or invisible text.
* Use a sitemap to ensure that every page in your site is open to MSNBot.
* There is a keyword density rule for MSNBot however we do not think that
keyword density is the same for every business sector. For instance, the
optimal keyword density for Maryland real estate will be different than the
optimal keyword density California real estate, even though sites found
under those keywords will represent the same business sector.
* Any common sense rule that applies to SPAM on other search engines applies
at MSN(beta) as well.
The MSN(beta) search engine
is slated for full release any time now but, as with other Microsoft
products, that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to see it anytime soon.
The engine has been very stable over the past two weeks and is providing
very strong and consistent results. Any bugs that remain to be worked out
are well hidden and do not seem to be effecting the search function in any
discernible way. When MSN does release their search engine as a full-version
at MSN.Com, they will have a good tool that presents a credible alternative
and serious challenge to Google and Yahoo. The long days of mono-culture
search are over.
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