After promising (or threatening) for years to take on Google and Yahoo! in the search engine wars, Microsoft finally unveiled its own search technology in the beta version of MSN Search (beta.search.msn.com). It looks and feels like Google. MSN Search does let users configure some aspects of the results page appearance and filter in or out foreign language and adult content. MSN will be issuing a Desktop search product to rival Google’s, and various press leaks recently suggest the designers are experimenting with letting searchers tweak the algorithms that determine the rank of their search results. Microsoft is making this ongoing design process very transparent by putting the staff on its own blog at blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch to chronicle their progress. The developers speak frankly about user suggestions, upcoming features, and even the early slipups. The team says it is still working on compatibility issues with, of all things, Mozilla’s Firefox browser, the open-source competitor to Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer. And within a day of its mid-November launch, the MSN Search beta experienced technical difficulties and delivered server errors to some users. No word on whether these errors resembled the legendary Blue Screen of Death.
