MSN Search Is the Talk of the Town

The MSN Search story has exploded with over 526 articles about it in Google News. However, much more interesting to me are the comments of the bloggers. The bloggers reflect the general public and are usually more blunt and to the point ... good and bad. Here are some of the blogger comments ... RV2 [blog] If you ask me, it's okay, but a terrible rip off of Yahoo. They stole the the search box idea with the tabs for the different types of searches (images, directories, etc.). Heck, it's even the same icons; a box with a little arrow on the bottom side. And there's a theme changer like Yahoo had during the holiday season. Except the MSN themes are extremely ugly. It doesn't make it any better to switch to "Simple White" from "Classic Blue". Too bad the MSN ripped version is more uglyified EDIT: No, I lied. There is one cool thing. If you to MSN.com in IE there's a cool butterfly that flies accross the search box. Yeah, I admit that's pretty cool, but the rest still stinks. it's halfway decent. This isn't to say it wouldn't be excellent if Google didn't exist, but Google does exist. 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. when you search for "worst browser" [with MSN Search], the first result is Internet Explorer Basketball (Windows Media; 31 sec, 1.03MB) ipipi blog As you can see from the screen shots below, MSN has eliminated much of the clutter of their search page (both MSN and Google appear on white "minimalist" backgrounds), purportedly to speed loading time, but will still contain ads and links to their other services. Kinda looks like MSN is adopting some of the Google mantra on minimalism murdok which publishes over 200 websites and email newsletters.