Add as a preferred source on Google


News

Microsoft Unveils Beta MSN Search Site

Microsoft on Thursday officially unveiled the new beta version of its MSN Search site, the company's hotly anticipated attempt to take on Google for Web searching.

The beta release comes after about two years worth of effort to build the underlying search engine. The complete version is planned for launch sometime next year.

The size of the search engine's index is increased to about 5 billion Web documents, Microsoft says, and much of the index is updated weekly or daily. The search engine is also integrated with the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia to provide relevant answers to direct questions and is tied to the MSN Music service to provide links to music samples when artist, song or album searches are entered.

Microsoft updated the interface in several ways. The search page is clean and simple, The interface now includes tabbed searches, such as Web, news and images. A new "Near Me" button allows users to search only sites in their geographical area.

Microsoft also added a Search Builder feature that allows users to emphasize or de-emphasize certain search criteria, such as specific sites or domains, countries, regions or languages. The builder also features dials, which allow users to prioritize approximate versus exact matches, very popular versus less popular sites and recently updated versus static pages.

The site appeared to be getting more traffic than it was ready for on Thursday. Several test searches returned a message that the engine was temporarily unavailable. Also the Encarta integration feature appears to be incompletely implemented at this point. Microsoft's news release on Thursday provided two examples of the types of direct questions that Encarta would provide answers for. Only one of them, "What is the capital of Turkey?" returned an answer. The other question, "What is the second-longest coastline in the world?" failed to bring up an answer from Encarta.

The site is available at http://beta.search.msn.com.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

Featured

  • Microsoft Dismantles RedVDS Cybercrime Marketplace Linked to $40M in Phishing Fraud

    In a coordinated action spanning the United States and the United Kingdom, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) and international law enforcement collaborators have taken down RedVDS, a subscription based cybercrime platform tied to an estimated $40 million in fraud losses in the U.S. since March 2025.

  • Sound Wave Illustration

    CrowdStrike's Acquisition of SGNL Aims to Strengthen Identity Security

    CrowdStrike signs definitive agreement to purchase SGNL, an identity security specialist, in a deal valued at about $740 million.

  • Microsoft Acquires Osmos, Automating Data Engineering inside Fabric

    In a strategic move to reduce time-consuming manual data preparation, Microsoft has acquired Seattle-based startup Osmos, specializing in agentic AI for data engineering.

  • Linux Foundation Unites Major Tech Firms to Launch Agentic AI Foundation

    The Linux Foundation today announced the creation of a new collaborative initiative — the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) — bringing together major AI and cloud players such as Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and other major tech companies.

Most   Popular