Microsoft Unveils Its New Search Engine -- at Last!

"After months of speculation and two 'preview' releases, Microsoft unwraps its new MSN search engine, the first major competitor to join Web search major leagues in nearly a year"

The MSN engine is out now, in beta, and this article provides a review of its features. At this time, MSN is claiming 5 billion pages indexed, but yesterday when I checked Google, they were claiming 8 billion. (A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you have a lot of web pages, but Google still has more!)

There are some interesting features cited for the new engine, but it is hard to say how they will impact the optimization trade. One feature I noted is the emphasis MSN is putting on localizing their search. I tried a search for my site under "internet marketing class", where I did not rank with MSN. When I turned on the "local" feature, however, I came up right near the top!

I was interested to read something in this article about how MSN is going about localizing the results. This is the first description of their process that I have come across. Not sure yet how to use that information in building more effective web sites, but we will figure it out!