Software giant Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com), whose Internet division launched on October 4 the second preview of MSN's upcoming search engine (http://techpreview.search.msn.com) with a Web index about five times fatter and reworked relevancy algorithms, announced on October 5 its plans to expand it to a total of 29 markets in 12 languages by October 7. Among other changes, MSN also has tweaked the relevancy of search results and improved a feature that corrects misspelled search queries. MSN officials also put no timeline on how long the latest sneak peek would remain open to the public. It also is available through the MSN Sandbox site (http://sandbox.msn.com) that highlights research and development work.
MSN's revived search test comes as Yahoo Inc. joins the growing list of search services letting users customize search. On October 4 Yahoo unveiled a beta test of its My Yahoo Search (http://next.yahoo.com), where users of its personalized home-page feature can also save, share, categorize and annotate public and private Web pages. Yahoo's move follows personalized search launches in recent weeks from Amazon.com Inc.'s A9.com search engine and Ask Jeeves Inc.
Justin Osmer, an MSN product manager, said that the latest preview incorporates feedback from the earlier alpha test as well as expands the index to more than 5 billion Web documents, and that in its new preview, MSN added a technique for grouping, or clustering, search results by domain in order to make sure that users view results from a variety of domains rather than getting multiple Web pages from the same domain.
The growth of the index appears to put MSN more in line with its top competitors, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. Google, for example, has said its index includes a total of about 6 billion documents and images, including 4.28 billion Web pages.
