Almost two years of development work and more than $100 million in capital spending made their debut Thursday when Microsoft unveiled the beta version of its new search engine, MSN Search.
The new service, available at beta.search.msn.com, crawls more than 5 billion Web pages, comes in 11 different languages, and doesn’t peer into the desktop — yet.
Microsoft is beta-testing the service to get comments from early adopters and reportedly expects the service to go live on its MSN portal in early 2005.
The service is meant to keep Microsoft in the paid-search game — one that has become especially lucrative of late for its primary search competitors, Yahoo and Google. Forrester Research predicts that the paid-search advertising market will hit $2.7 billion by the end of 2004 and will grow to $5.6 billion in 2005.
An earlier version of the Microsoft search engine went up on the Web in July; public response was underwhelming, since the engine searched many fewer pages than Google, Yahoo or this new iteration.
The new engine also includes an on-board local search feature and the ability to query in natural language: for example, by asking “What is the oldest year-round port in the world?” factual answers will be provided by Encarta, Microsoft’s online encyclopedia.
Should they be searching for information about a music artist, users will also find links to Microsoft’s MSN Music download service.
The MSN Search also incorporates a Search Builder interface. This uses a series of tabs and sliders to help beginning searchers take advantage of advanced search functions that most users normally avoid, such as limiting searches to a specific domain, or changing the relative weights of popularity and freshness of sites in delivering results.
Until Wednesday, the Microsoft developers could have claimed that searching 5 billion Web pages gave them a 700,000-page edge on Google. But on the eve of the MSN Search debut, Google announced that its spiders now examine eight billion pages.
Network
