Search Engine Journal

MSN today launched a range of new and updated services for its MSN Search service, aimed at helping people get faster, cleaner and easier access to the information they want. As part of a $100 million investment in improving the customer experience, MSN is delivering the most significant upgrade to MSN Search in its history, including a new MSN Search home page that features easy navigation to popular MSN services; a new, cleaner look for its search results page that separates algorithmic results from paid results links and eliminates paid inclusion.

“With this significant upgrade to MSN Search, we are delighted to now offer what we believe is the best search service available for the 350 million MSN customers. Among the many improvements, we’re particularly excited to increase the relevancy of many search query results by up to 45 percent,” said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of MSN. “This massive investment kicks off a wave of innovation from MSN that will move search beyond its current, limited offering to delivering the next-generation search experience.”

These improvements are initial steps toward achieving the MSN vision of taking search beyond today’s basic Internet search services to deliver direct answers to people’s questions from a broad range of information. As part of this vision, MSN will launch a new algorithmic search engine and a range of other search services worldwide within the next year. Today, MSN reached an important milestone by releasing an initial technology test of its forthcoming algorithmic search engine to gather feedback from webmasters and search enthusiasts.

I like the new MSN search. The front search page is simple and MSN does a good job of keeping their other MSN sites and services branded on the front page without getting too cluttered.

The sponsored search engine results are well marked and obvious that they are paid for. This was always something that MSN had to improve on.

Bloggers have already voiced their opinions:

Andy Beal of Search Engine Lowdown:

Not only has MSN been given a very “Google-looking” start page, but the search results now show paid ads as “Sponsored Ads” in a format similar to Yahoo and Google. Microsoft says they have already injected $100 million into the new MSN Search.