This morning I tried out the MSN Search Beta and was suitably impressed. There were some availability issues last night which led some to proclaim the new MSN search: an unmitigated disaster. However today things are running fine.

I tried the following queries on both services and got some interesting results

  1. "dare obasanjo"

    Google Result Description
    http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/ My current personal weblog
    http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/Carnage4Life/diary My former personal weblog
    http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo My current work-related weblog
    http://www.xml.com/pub/au/142 My author page on XML.com
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml01202003.asp The most popular article from my Extreme XML column on MSDN

    MSN Search (beta) Result Description
    http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/ My current personal weblog
    http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo My current work-related weblog
    http://www.xml.com/pub/au/142 My author page on XML.com
    http://www.rssbandit.org/ow.asp?DareObasanjo My personal page on the RSS Bandit wiki
    http://www.afriguru.com/2004/dare-obasanjo.html A blog post that refers to me as a Nigerian XML expert

  2. "rss bandit" OR rssbandit

    Google Result Description
    http://www.rssbandit.org/ The RSS Bandit webpage
    http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=cb8d3173-9f65-46fe-bf17-122e3703bb00 The former RSS Bandit project page on GotDotNet Workspaces
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/rssbandit The current RSS Bandit project page on SourceForge
    http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/5/16/135349/207 A post in my former blog about RSS Bandit
    http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2004/01/04/47392.aspx A review of RSS Bandit by Roy Osherove

    MSN Search (beta) Result Description
    http://www.rssbandit.org/ The RSS Bandit webpage
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml02172003.asp The first article I wrote about RSS Bandit on MSDN
    http://www.marketingwithrss.com/rss-bandit-or-rssbandit/ SPAM
    http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=RSS%20Bandit Posts from the RSS Bandit category of my current weblog
    http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Technical_Services/Cataloguing/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/News_Readers/ A catalog of RSS readers

The results from MSN Search were pertinent and in some cases moreso than the Google ones. Although MSN Search did allow a spam entry to make it into the top 5 results it also returned a link to all the RSS Bandit related posts on my blog which Google didn't pick up. Well, it doesn't look so inconceivable anymore that Microsoft will give Google a run for their money.

Then just wait until you see launch version of MSN Spaces and compare it to Blogger (although I'd prefer comparisons to LiveJournal or TypePad). The next few years are going to be fun.