What the software giant unveiled is a more advanced version of technology it introduced in July, with more searchable documents and personalisation features. The site is accessible at beta.search.msn.com.
MSN Search Beta has more bells and whistles than previous versions. The company, however, has not yet replaced Yahoo Search technology from powering its engine, and it won't do so until sometime in 2005.
Microsoft had been widely hyped as being ready to introduce a fully fledged search engine sometime this year. Founder and chairman Bill Gates said earlier in 2004 that the company would have a homegrown technology by the end of the year to best the reigning search champ, Google.
Still, Justin Osmer, product manager of MSN Search, said, "While it's not final, it's a significant step to getting us back in the game."
Despite boasts from Gates and chief executive Steve Ballmer that Microsoft will build a superior Web search technology from scratch, the company is still largely a philosophical threat to the number one, Google, and number two Yahoo.
The three companies are battling to win search customers and a greater stake in the multibillion-dollar advertising business associated with results pages. Microsoft is considered a formidable competitor by all, with plans to eventually combine desktop and Internet search, but its service has yet to fully materialise after 20 months in development (which is why it licenses technology from rival Yahoo). Meanwhile Google and Yahoo make seemingly daily improvements to theirs.
"This is still a shot in the firing range rather than in the battle," said Danny Sullivan, an industry expert.
Among the improvements to the version introduced on Thursday is the capability of letting visitors personalise search results by setting their geographical location. After performing a search, a Web surfer can hit the "near me" button to see local results. The technology is also designed to automatically identify the physical location of Web pages it indexes, and it attempts to detect the locale of a visitor to better match his or her results.
The beta service also lets people use a "dial" to reconfigure search results based on the dates pages were updated and their popularity on the Web.
MSN Music and Encarta, or its encyclopaedia service, will also play a role in the new search site. When a person searches for a person or place along with an indicator, i.e., San Francisco population, it will display an answer from Encarta. Also, people can search for the name of a musician like Madonna to call up clips of her music from MSN.
MSN said that the service now searches a precedent-setting five billion Web documents, up from one billion in July. However, Google said on Wednesday that it updated its index from roughly four billion documents to more than eight billion.
The layout of the test site will include sponsored search results from MSN partner Overture Services, a subsidiary of Yahoo.
Talkback
I just did a couple of image searches in comparisson with Google, MSN did not do as good. Still a way to go MS, and you can bet as soon as they [MS] get comfortable the adverts will start to appear -- thats when people will go elsewhere.