MSN Unveils Their Search Strategy

At long last, MSN has revealed their plans for the future in terms of internet searches performed through their new search engine. The SEO community has been eagerly awaiting some definite information, and Monday's press release was the first step. It's not complete information yet by any means, but it's certainly an interesting indication of things to come.

The first item of note is that MSN will actually have 3 separate search capabilities: General search; news search; and blog search. Blogbot and Newsbot will be powered through Moreover Technologies Inc., using their listings of internet news and weblogs. These 2 search bots are expected to debut on MSN relatively soon in the United States. Their regular search bot will not go live until later, but hopefully before the end of this year.

A beta version of Newsbot is already live in some other countries, which means that this is the bot we know the most about at this time. Not only does it draw on standard internet news sources such as Yahoo! News and Google News, but it also sets up cookies to allow for personalized searches based on your search history. At this time, there are no live betas of the Blogbot, but it should go live in the United States at the same time as Newsbot. It's unclear just how, precisely, these search bots will be integrated into the overall search scheme on MSN.

That's not all that MSN is working on though. They are also developing an Answerbot, which is designed to allow the computer user to ask a question in "natural" language, and get the correct response. This bot will also be designed to "learn" as it goes, so the more you use it, the better it gets at understanding what you want.

I'm very interested to see how these new search bots work once they go live. It's unrealistic to expect perfection right away, of course, but I see the potential for great things here. Although news searches exist, and blog search engines exist, along with a variety of standard web searches, it would be very nice to see them integrated smoothly into an overall search, with perhaps the option to search blogs instead of general web listings (similar to what Yahoo! currently has on their tabs at the top, but with a few additional and/or different options).

One thing that is exciting to me is seeing how the different search engines are encouraging developments and innovations in each other. Google comes up with something fresh which is very successful, and Yahoo! and MSN take note. Then it's Yahoo!'s turn, then MSN's. Healthy competition between them seems to be working in favor of the internet surfer at this time, giving them ever more options to find what they need quickly and easily, from an ever-increasing library of websites, news stories, images and blog posts.