MSN Search - not as bad as you thought written 6 years ago
It’s well known that el Googlio is probably the best search engine there is out there. Google isn’t becoming a verb for nothing you know!
However, recently visiting the msn search site reveals a more slicker approach to searching than I remember from my uneducated childhood.
It’s full lots of useful things, such as RSS Feeds, Encarta Search, and a Search Builder.
The Encarta Search is just that, a search on Encarta giving you free access to the de-facto Primary School information resource.
RSS Feeds give you a feed of the results for a particular query, useful if you want to know how your website is faring in the search ranks.
But the Search builder has some handy options within it, and is one of the reasons for writing this entry. The “Results Ranking” allows you to specify the weighting used, deciding how your results are sorted:
Updated Recently vs. Static - Lets you decide if you want results updated every day, or a fixed fact resource.
Very Popular vs. Less Popular - If your search subject is sparsely linked on the internet, you can filter out unnecessary results.
Approximate match vs. Exact Match - Not quite sure how your word is spelt? using this slider will allow you to broaden, or narrow your results accordingly.
Suppose you wanted to search for our hero, Robert Innes.
- Using the default search we’re way down on page 4.
- Adjusting the Popularity, and we’re still on page 4, but the fourth entry down!
- Specifying an exact match gets us page 3!!!
Not that dramatic, but given the correct search criteria, could make finding certain sites easier.
That’s not all!
Because msn search has lax restrictions on which results are included means that unpopular websites that perhaps aren’t linked from the front page of the BBC (such as personal pages/local stores etc…) will be present. But because of the Strict listing criteria in Google, they may not even appear in google’s list.
Consider this site for example, a “Robert Innes” search on google doesn’t even yield a result in the first 10 pages, and that’s all because I’m a lowly unlinked website :’(
Anyway — just to say perhaps we should all open our horizons to alternative searching solutions.
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