This is where you can find the new MSN Beta test search engine.
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i'm liking it. the main site i work on is doing very well for some pretty competitive terms.

the more i work on these type of these the more confident i am that i have a pretty reasonable grasp on seo.

on the other hand the current engine up on msn seems to be using age of site as a major factor...can't say that i'm liking that too much.
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I'm liking it too, but I've been reading quite a bit about the new MSN search beta, there are some problems, but it's a beta, in my opinion once the actual bugs get worked out, like the site crashing when overloaded, it's going to be fairly competitive.

Some SEO types would point to the ease of success as a sign that the algo they are running is too simple. Personally, I don't follow that logic, only one person is number one after all. But there is some truth to it, it's not very good at filtering the quality of incoming links, or rating the sites by type, seems to be much more a case of raw numbers, coupled with good on page optimization.

On the other hand, a search phrase I follow for one of my sites is correctly, finally, listed as number one. But some other sites I do get number one for a search phrase they really don't deserve to have, domain names are counting for a lot I think in that case.

Most of the criticism I'm seeing on MSN could just as well be applied to Google or Yahoo, they both have some very major issues, good SEO's are having little problem keeping up from what I can see, and when they clamp down, especially google, it ends up really damaging the over all serp quality.

However, every major beta/preview release of MSN has gotten better by quite a bit.

The most serious issue MSN is going to have is due to the fact they are trying to run a massive site on Microsoft Windows server, that's a totally bloated product, can't really be stripped down like linux or unix can. For example, hotmail used to run on unix servers, the OS was cut down to about 30 megabytes, when they switched to windows reliability went down a lot, the OS could not be made smaller than I believe 900 megabytes, which makes live network updates of the OS server farm basically impossible.

But maybe they'll just throw so much hardware at it that it will be ok, hard to say.
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yea Yahoo is currently all kinds of screwed up. i'm guessing they went back to an old cache or brought back some old bs spammy sites. their current results (those on msn currently) suck a#s. prolly the worse i've seen in a while.

btw, the link: tool on the beta msn gives prolly the most accurate number of backlinks you'll find anywhere.
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I just found this one from Yahoo, it gets many more links to a site I tested it on than the MSN tool:

linksite:domain.com -site:domain.com

I hadn't heard of linksite before, I knew about linkdomain, I don't quite know the difference between the two, but linksite returned pretty much all the links that have ever existed for the site I tested it on.

By the way, during testing I found pages of mine that have been offline for a long time now, some almost a year. I've seen this in google too sometimes.
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