MSN search does not seem to give high preference to domain names while most of the other search engines do. For eg. Searching for a non-english keyword trap17 should have resulted in trap17.com in the first place but instead more preference was given to another websites which were linking to trap17.
This could had been fine with some other keywords which had some meaning in english language, however this point was like one of the most downside of msn. Because, most of the msn searches are triggered by the web browser itself ( internet explorer ) and many a times, mistyped domain names or keywords should be searched for and corresponding domain names should be returned.
This also has negative effects. There are many domain names which correspond to commonly used search keywords. Like free web hosting, I think there are more than 50 sites whose domains have these words in it. But, in such cases msn can do an advanced filtering to see which domain actually has a lot of info regarding the keywords and it can return the results.
Second flaw, The search results are not sorted in page numbers so if you are going to find search more and more pages, you will have to rely on the Back and Next search links. That is rather crappy.
Third, It takes a very long time before your site appears in MSN search. I really hate this fact. Google includes any site with in a week and starts showing its indexed contect within a month or two. While most of the search engines including msn take about 6-7 months. I dont know. wtf takes them such a long time. I hope the new msn search will take pretty less time to index sites.
Also, the web site description returned by msn search is simply extracted from the title tags which may be good in some cases but most of the people ( when using frontpage ) forget to put that . And I saw some pages with descriptions of no more than 3 words. While the best way for extracting description would be get the highest keyword which occurs throughout the page and then extract a text of about 100 words which includes that keyword. I had used this method when I had created a search engine in perl ( a text file driven Search :-).
MSN search definately requires a lot of improvement.
Please post your suggestions and comments . ...


