The New MSN Search: Decent, But Not Google

So, MSN Search, a.k.a “the Google killer” has been released. The short version of the story is that it’s halfway decent. This isn’t to say it wouldn’t be excellent if Google didn’t exist, but Google does exist.

Here are a few examples of MSN’s drawbacks (using actual searches):

“12 inches in centimeters” Google returns: “12 inches = 30.48 centimeters” MSN returns some obscure links relating to seabirds.

“fonew” Google returns: “Did you mean: phone” MSN returns: “Were you looking for fone”

“bukake” Google returns: “Did you mean: bukkake” MSN returns all results with misspelling.

“donky pnch” Google returns the right thing. MSN does not.

“par hiltn” Google returns: “Did you mean: paris hilton” MSN returns: “Were you looking for par hilton”

Uh, yeah, thanks MSN, I was very curious about Par Hilton.

So, there are a couple of major ones–conversions/math and spell checking. These are big for me, so Google comes up the winner there.

On the positive side, I understand that MSN’s robots are crawling entire sites even if they have query strings in the URL; this is something Google doesn’t seem to do. This is a major win for MSN as far as I’m concerned (having just migrated to WP). I hear also that localization is better with MSN, i.e. search results in other languages are superior. So those are a couple bonuses for Microsoft.

Overall, however, I am struck by the fact that MSN’s offering pretty much looks like Google–from the overall simplistic interface to the look of the settings screen. To rip it off so blatantly and then not bring something new and exciting to the table just about kills it for me. I can’t help but be unimpressed. If Google were to start indexing PHP content I’d have absolutely no reason to favor MSN.

Some additional notes:

** MSN’s cached page content does not do autohighlighting like Google. ** MSN can’t search into PDFs.