Recently MSN launched their beta version of their own search engine, This has been a long wait for the SEO industry, MSN is the best search engine only next to google and yahoo, There was no one to give stiff competition to Google, Google was/is totally dominant of the search engine industry, Yahoo which launched their own search engine before 6 months back was not too impressive, There are not many switches to yahoo search from google,

Now that the MSN search is out we should see some shifts, We just have to wait, MSN has invested heavily on their new search engine which will have direct impact on the quality of their search results,

The beta version of the search is here:

http://beta.search.msn.com

As soon as the initial launch the beta version had some technical difficulties, Some of us were unable to reach the beta search the following command was seen on the search page,

"The site is unavailable, Please check back soon"

Screenshot:



It was a bit weird since this was their launch date of the beta version, Then i came across a posting where it mentioned MSN has launched their own blog,

In the MSN search blog/weblog I found the following information posted,

"In the process of making our new MSN Search beta broadly available we
experienced some technical difficulties that caused the beta service to function
improperly or be unavailable for some users for periods of time. We're working
through these issues one by one and you should see service availability and
quality improve soon if not already. We apologize for any
inconvenience.
We expected to find some problems in the beta, and we
expect there will also be times when we limit service availability for
maintenance purposes. We want to find those problems in order to help us
build a higher quality product, and we appreciate your help in doing this.
A
few other notes:
1) Several people have reported problems with the search
service and with this blog that appear to be browser compatibility issues with
FireFox. We're working on broad browser support and have done some
specific testing in this area, but it's clear more is needed. Thank you
for the reports.
2) When reporting issues, please include
as much detailed information as you can in your report so that we can reproduce
and fix the bug. E.g. for browser errors, tell us which type of browser,
the version number, and information on any proxy you're using. For
relevance problems, tell us the exact query you entered, any other special
settings you're using, e.g. via search builder, and the resulting URL you
expected to see.
3) The "Help us Improve" link at the bottom of the results
page is an easy way to give us feedback.

"

But later i was able to perform searches for some of the sites we monitor, It was good, Most of the results are similiar to google which is very good, From my understanding google uses the best IR algorithm out there, Now MSN search engine seem to be the direct contender to Google,

Google with their link lag algorithm is not too impressive these days, Hope google finds MSN search a real competition and do some update to their algo,

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb