New Scientist Gives New Microsoft Search Thumbs Up

Author: Jeremy C. Wright, Staff Writer

Popular British scientific magazine New Scientist has given Microsoft’s new MSN search engine, still in very early beta, good grades.

By measuring response times, ability to answer plain language questions, quality and relevance of results as well as ease of fine tuning or drilling down into results, the experts have come to the conclusion that Microsoft’s new engine is just as good as Google’s. In fact, it is just as good as any search engine in the world.

"The differences between the search engines are now so slight, it's going to be hard for any company to differentiate on technical grounds," Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch website in Darien Connecticut, told New Scientist.

New Scientist does say that Google is unlikely to be dethroned anytime soon precisely for that reason. Users will need a compelling reason to switch, and “good enough” results simply aren’t good enough.

A recent Associated Press review of the search service, on the other hand, says that Microsoft’s new effort “falls short”, largely on the basis of comparative results with Google.

As we noted earlier this week, this is really less about relevance and more about helping users find the right data faster. MSN’s tool certainly has a way to go towards reducing the time it takes to find the right result, but it is currently no worse than Google.

The interesting thing will be watching how these two search giants really compete and push each other. Will MSN’s innovative “relevance sliders” push Google to provide more user friendly, non beta, customization? Will Google’s low-key advertising spur the MSN Search team to tone down the ads in favor of relevant data? It will likely take MSN at least 6-8 months to work out the kinks in their engine, so there is still a lot of watching to do.

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