Don't Back Down

While I was reading Jeff Sandquist, I came across this piece that talks about the new MSN Search. Perhaps it was the mention of the football that made me look, since we're so close to the Super Bowl. I'm really not sure.

Nonetheless, I did look. And Jeff's arguments for the new MSN Search were compelling. Specifically because I've also noticed that there are times when I look for things - oftentimes hotel phone numbers and addresses and the like - that I can't find that information (easily) through Google. Instead, like Jeff, I get all sorts of results offering to sell something to me, but more and more often I can't find the simple information that I want.

So I tried it. I have to say that I'm impressed. Notably, the page is really, really small for a Microsoft-branded site. It loads quickly without a bunch of extra junk. I could even do without the football (or other graphic), but I could live with it because it is very unobtrusive. After all, Google has its doodles. No reason Microsoft shouldn't be allowed the same courtesy.

I have thus far found only one serious disadvantage to MSN Search.

I first thought that the cache isn't as fresh as Google's. I looked at my page through Google's cache and it is from February 4th. In MSN Search, it's from January 21. Two weeks is quite a bit of lag time. Surely Microsoft could do better. I see from my stats that MSNBot visited less than five hours after the last time that the Googlebot stopped by to check on things. If that's the case, their cache shouldn't be so badly out-of-date.

Interestingly, I then noticed that if I search on Chad Everett instead of Chad, I get a fresher cached page in the results (fresher, in fact, than Google's). That's a little strange, don't you think? Both show a URL of jayseae.cxliv.org, yet the cached view is different. This isn't a show-stopper, but it's just a little odd that accessing the same page from two separate result sets will give me a different cached result.

Incidentally, I also see two advantages to MSN Search.

The first is that, right at the bottom of the page, is a nice orange RSS button. Click it and you have a feed of the search results. That's sweet. It would be nice if it were featured more prominently - perhaps higher on the page - but it's nice that it's there nonetheless.

And the final advantage to MSN Search? Their search returns me as the first or second result for Chad. I'm at the bottom of the third page on Google. Interestingly, the results for Chad Everett are indentical on both sites (at least for the first couple entries) - the actor's profile is listed first and I'm second. This flip-flops over time at Google, so I'd assume the same will happen at MSN Search.

In the meantime, I've added an "MSN" search keyword to my address bar so that I can keep using it. Not sure if I'm ready to switch my default search enging just yet, but it's actually tempting.