Microsoft Launches Beta Version of New MSN Search Service.
You’ll be able to try the beta for yourself at: beta.search.msn.com. The rollout is evidently underway as I blog this.
One feature you’ll probably want to experiment with is the Search Builder. It gives you finer control over the search. My favorite is to adjust the results ranking. It provides three sliders in which you can control the order of the search results. These sliders control the “exactness” of the match, how popular the sites are (based on the number of links to them), and the newness of the content (based on when it was added to the index.) For Tablet PC news hounds like myself this last slider might turn out to be the most useful day to day. It’s interesting to play with the various search settings to see how the search rankings change. You can rank sites by freshness, for instance, by clicking on “Search Builder” and then “Results Ranking”:
Actually, if you are keyboard centric, you can bypass the sliders and type extra search constraints directly:
Tablet PC {frsh=100}
The 100 gives priority ranking to the “freshest” results. A 0 would give preference to “static” content. I’m still learning what all this means.
Oh…there’s a new Search blog at: blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch.
Update: Lora tells me that Dave Letterman even had a great joke on the new MSN Search. I missed it. Rats.
I added the screencapture this morning to this post. I wasn’t sure last night if it was OK to do so or not. Better safe than sorry.