As you may or may not know, Microsoft has merged all search features of MSN into LIVE. At the end of the day, MSN and LIVE are pretty much the same according to Microsoft. MSN and LIVE are powered by the same technology but are more or less aimed at a different set of niches.
In general MSN was meant to complete with Google, AOL and Yahoo on a content basis. MSN’s home page features news, articles, shopping and more while LIVE allows the user to set they own home page features. For the sake of this article, I do not care about shopping or headlines or what the celebrity went to jail this week. What I do care about is the impact all of this has in retrospect to search engine rankings and results.
A few tests of mine have shown different search results between MSN and LIVE based on the same query terms. This is where the fun began as Microsoft deems that search results from the two sites are powered by the same technology. So there is no reason I should get two sets of results. Now I must say that the ratio of odd ball results to perfect cross reference results is very minor. None the less, why has this happened? Why am I getting two sets of results?
The long story short is that I have no idea why two query results are presented between MSN and LIVE. The brain twister is that the query terms results I found different, corrected themselves on the following day of testing. What this really tells me is that Microsoft is still unsure of their search algorithms.
It is perfectly understandable that testing needs to take place. My concern is over the fact that Microsoft publically announces that MSN and LIVE are powered by the same technology. But it is obvious to me that this “technology" can be partitioned to a certain degree. More importantly it is telling me that Microsoft is still lost in the world of search engines and trying to see which foot to stand on.
The real focus here is that MSN and LIVE and just grains of sand in the world of search engines. Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do in comparison to Google and Yahoo. The real problem is that Microsoft does not know what they want; therefore we don’t know what to feed it. Good luck Microsoft, you’re going to need it!