New MSN Search Now Available

Well, it looks like the mythical MSN Search is alive and kicking: http://techpreview.search.msn.com/ .

Over all the results are pretty nice - but there are definitely some keyword areas that need some work.

In general, for sites in niches that I promote, pretty much the same factors that make a site rank well in Yahoo and Google will let it rank well in the new MSN search.

This "tech preview" does show a few problems - namely that unlike most other search engines - MSN Search is showing every page from a site that matches the search terms.

One of my sites occupies 38 of the first 45 search results for a keyword.

More to come, I am sure.

Microsoft Founder Promises Better Search Engines

"We were in internet search before Google was founded" - Bill Gates

Bill Gates has promised that search engines would be 10 times more sophisticated in the future and computers would be far better able to recognize the voice of their user...

Full coverage here.

Google Adds New Feature To Cached Pages

Last week Google added a new feature to how they present their cache of pages from their crawls - you can now see the cached text only of any page - for instance, below is the header of their cache of Yahoo's home page.

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.yahoo.com/.
G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web.
The page may have changed since that time. Click here for the current page without highlighting.
This cached page may reference images which are no longer available. Click here for the cached text only.
To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com
Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content.

Basically any cached URL which has this appended to it - &strip=1 - will show the cached page with no images, and any alt tags - and without CSS formatting.

Theories vary as to why - I think that perhaps this Google's shot across bow to let webmasters know "we see you".

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