New and Different Features of microsoft new search engine, finally the big M is trying to compete in the search engine market and has launched their new search engine kuma with 5 billiong pages.
The new Miccrosoft Search engine includes some features that differ from those found on Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves:
1. The most prominent difference is the "Near Me" button appearing next to the "Search" button. Clicking the Near Me button effectively runs a local search for your query. for now the local near me is only for the searchers located in the U.S.
2. By default, your browser's IP address is used to determine your location. You can override this by explicitly entering your current location using the Settings command. The "Near Me" function works quite well, primarily because Microsoft has tagged every web page in its index that has geographic information, using what the company calls an "overlapping tiles model," starting with zip code, then including neighborhood, region, city, state and country information if available.
3. Microsoft MSN Search also now incorporates additional non-web sources of information in results on a query-specific basis. For example, queries for factual information get "direct answers" from Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia. For music-related queries, inline results from MSN Music are included, with a link to further information, downloads and so on.
4. Microsoft is also offering an interesting hybrid approach to customization and advanced search. Clicking the Search Builder link opens up a window beneath the search form that provides explicit controls over many of your query variables. Most of these controls are similar to those hidden away on the advanced search page of other search engines. Having them available from any search form is a nice touch that should encourage more use of these refinement tools.
"The point is trying to allow the average person to be able to build relatively complex queries relatively easily," said Osmer.
The first allows you to easily modify your query by adding terms or an exact phrase, or excluding terms from the search. You can also limit your search by domain, country or region or language, or to pages that link to a particular URL. Search Builder automatically formats your query with the appropriate syntax, even nesting queries in parenthesis when appropriate.
5. The final refinement tool is the coolest feature of the new MSN Search, allowing you to control result ranking using sliders. There are three sliders available. One lets you select the degree of match between your search terms and result pages, from an exact match to an approximate match. The second lets you specify page popularity, from very popular to less popular. The final slider controls freshness of results, from updated recently to static pages.
Using all three sliders in combination produces a remarkably wide range of results for the same query, and for some types of searches can be extremely useful. In other cases, results become, well, just bizarre. I love the idea of giving searchers more control over results, and I like the idea of using sliders, but this particular feature will need refinement before it catches on in a big way.
6. Image search is also new, but not unique. MSN Search has partnered with Picsearch to provide access to over 400 million images. Osmer says that MSN Search starts with the Picsearch database and adds its own tweaks, but at this point results from MSN Search and Picsearch are almost identical for the test queries I ran.
The quality of image search results is reasonably high, especially when compared to an image search in Google, which seems to have faltered lately. Among the majors, Yahoo's recently enhanced Image search database seems to be the clear leader in this area, at least for now.
Tags: Engine, features, microsoft, search