search.msn.com, my review (16)

1 Name: Sling!myL1/SLing 05/02/01(Tue)16:36 ID:Qw7AeZRM

According to Slashdot:
""The new MSN Search, "the first-ever search engine built from the ground up by Microsoft", has been launched worldwide."
so I'm assuming it's a non-beta.

Let's see...
Oh man, that thing is buggy, ugly and full of annoyances...
One page of results has more ads than results.
The "Search Builder" uses Javascript (I have Javascript turned off, and I don't plan to turn it on.)
The main search page and the others use images.
If I set my country as "Switzerland" I get the German page. What if I don't speak German or French? Beside, they forgot Italian.
In Settings I have to set my location. But the search results seem influenced by the location. So I get a lot of Swiss pages first instead of international results.
Finally I found the trick to stay in English with search.msn.com/?noredir=1
Ok, now no more Swiss pages prioritization.
What does "Near Me" do? The Help page is very unfriendly. I assume it means near where I live, but I get no results. Maybe because I typed Tokyo, Japan in Settings? :)
Search results don't seem weighted. Completely random?
Trying the Encarta: "fusion reactor" gives a page where there is no info whatsoever, just a few links. Why create an entry if it has nothing to say? And that ticking down timer is annoying.
Few, unsorted results using "Images".
"Find Movies" gave me empty (but ads ridden) pages for the few seeks I tried.
"Look up word" gives me a single, truncated entry.
Searching for "what the foo are you doing" silently strips the and are.
OTOH, foo doesn't seem to trigger any ad. Whee...

2 Name: Sling!myL1/SLing 05/02/01(Tue)16:52 ID:Qw7AeZRM

Also, according to some Slashdot's posts, the msnbot seems to be very buggy too.

"msnbot.msn.com hit my web site no less than 10,661 times last month"
"msnbot ate up half my bandwidth allowance in three days when it first started crawling a while back. It's the rudest robot I've ever encountered; Google manage to give me good search results with barely any bandwidth usage"

3 Name: dmpk2k!hinhT6kz2E 05/02/02(Wed)07:02 ID:1ADY8HFU

Here's hoping the damn thing obeys robots.txt, or is that too much to ask?

4 Name: Sling!myL1/SLing 05/02/02(Wed)08:11 ID:Qw7AeZRM

According to reports I read on Slashdot, no it doesn't (didn't?) obey the robots.txt.

5 Name: Sling!myL1/SLing 05/02/02(Wed)08:30 ID:Qw7AeZRM

Or, maybe those guys had the wrong syntax.
The proper way according to MS is described here:
search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_RestrictAccessToSite.htm

6 Name: Squeeks!!XjdwLWBy 05/02/02(Wed)12:43 ID:Heaven

MSN bot found us, well it did a long time ago when it was still in beta. It also does crawl a LOT MORE frequently than Googlebot. Google comes around here maybe 1-2 times a month, so far MSN bot has showed up about 10 times in January.

I have no real problem with it at this stage as its not raping our connection or being a big annoyance. However if users here wish for me to exclude MSN bot from crawling, make a thread over in feedback and I will respond.

7 Name: Unverified Source 05/02/05(Sat)08:13 ID:Heaven

fuck you

8 Name: Sling!myL1/SLing 05/02/05(Sat)14:38 ID:Heaven

>>7 is DQN quality

9 Name: Unverified Source 05/02/05(Sat)23:39 ID:Heaven

lol akira yamaguchi

10 Name: bubu!bUBu/A.ra6 05/02/07(Mon)19:12 ID:Heaven

-When I'm the Golden Goth of Sweitzerland, I cannot set Romontsch Grischun.
-When I'm the consigliere di don michele GT-R of bella italia, I cannot choose Furlan, or Greek.
-When I'm the Management by Perkele Minister of Finnija, it offers me no leetle button to quick-switch to Swedish, like it does with français in the swiss version? etc. pp.
-The iron curtain is still in action. Iron ignore for the Slavs. Judging from the embarassing interface translations it's better that way.
-Randomly switching through tld variants, I found that if I choose msn.at in Norsk, it hates me a mighty deal.
-It forcibly keeps redirecting me to msn.es, (unless I use the noredir) which is nice, since the spanish border is roughly two thousand kilometres away.
-The image search feature "color"-"black/white" is neat, because it is so unworking, that the results are often an exact inversion of my choice. YELLOW/GREEN: VERY BLACK AND WHITE YES! on the other hand: VARYING SHADES OF GREY - OHO HOW COLORFUL!
-The assistant is suuuper. You can search for websites from Malaysia but not Poland. You can search for Singapurian ones, but MSN hates Sprksa. Ha---in your face, Slobi!
-Using the wretched msn.es beast (sigh) in german ("for shits and giggles"), the help button gives me help - suomeksi style, within a german frame of visigoth unfriendly. BEST! Is this thing http://tinyurl.com/65x8q trying to out-Mezzofanti me? I give up, it wins.
-Germans (msn.de) may search the german-version Encarta, Austrians (msn.at) may not. Austrians should die dumb.
-Italian image search is by definition Swedish. Randomly. The search button happily shouts IMMAGINI! The result page waffles about Bildresultat.
-Now it's slowly starting to be surprising. What is it trying to tell me with this http://tinyurl.com/4wr86 - other than 'I have a mindset of "lol europ it is small rite? rite? litel country full of castles"!' No, that's not a photochop.

Good points:
+When searching for more educated queries, it finds no appropriate ads and gives up on the ad spam. BEER+FOOTBALL bombards me with sponsored ebay ads. augustin+d'autrecourt gives me no ads at all. The results are worthless, but adfree.

11 Name: Sling!myL1/SLing 05/02/07(Mon)20:17 ID:Heaven

Heh heh. :)
It isn't MS if it isn't:

  • buggy
  • unsecure
  • annoying

12 Name: !WAHa.06x36 05/02/08(Tue)15:04 ID:fbcDdd/u

Generally somebody should tell people that make programs and websites that try to automatically select languages that a) language minorities find it highly insulting when a program talks to them in the majority language, b) some people like to do computing in English no matter what country they live in, and c) you're just going to guess wrong anyway, so fucking give it up already.

For some reason, open-source software seems to be much more annoying than others at this - probably because commercial software wants to sell you only one language and charge you again if you want another.

13 Name: Sling!myL1/SLing 05/02/08(Tue)15:52 ID:QLKBu0N2

There is an additional problem in that English words are often translated in all sort of ways.
Even Microsoft translated OSed use different words for the same thing here and there. And the translated sentences are sometimes horribly long winded.
A fictional example: "digiletter", "web-transmitted message", "world wide web-based electronically converted internet online correspondence" instead of just "email".

14 Name: bubu!bUBu/A.ra6 05/02/09(Wed)01:40 ID:Heaven

>>12

>>13
that is why the true os-tan of every windows is a brown-suited, dour clerk with foggy glasses, punching numbers into a mechanical calculator eternally mumbling "1+1=2 I HATE YOU".
However I find the somewhat old-fashioned and orotund vocabulary somewhat endearing at times. It makes me feel like a little boy trying to get Her Majesty The Queen to help with his math homework.

15 Name: Unverified Source 05/02/09(Wed)22:26 ID:Heaven

> "1+1=10 I HATE YOU".

fixed

16 Name: Unverified Source 05/02/11(Fri)00:09 ID:Heaven

>>15
We're talking about Microsoft. Maximum inflation is their modus operandi, hence 1 + 1 = 11

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