The Optimiser

14 March 2005

Your personal source of Internet news

MSN dumps Yahoo! In favour of search beta

Microsoft's search results are now being provided by MSN Search (beta) rather than Yahoo!

MSN had an agreement with Yahoo! to provide users with search results, but the company has been developing its MSN Search service for months.

The software firm's MSN Search (beta) robot "MSNbot" has been spidering the web to index and prioritise hundreds of millions of webpages.

Microsoft will prove a daunting rival to the more established Google and Yahoo! search engines, with its hefty spending power.

The new MSN search engine is being developed in-house by Microsoft and will be used to replace Yahoo! on the site once the code is finalised. During initial tests, MSN beta was able to index more than five billion web documents, despite disappointing outages.

"Some may notice that we have been recently scaling up and scaling down the MSN Search beta service," Just Osmer, MSN product manager for Search, told BetaNews. "This continues to be part of our testing process as we near the final version and incorporate user's feedback. Until we fully launch the site, you may expect to see various changes occurring."

MSN is currently losing millions of dollars in advertising revenue from Yahoo! and will be keen to establish a profitable advertising model as soon as possible. The entrance of Microsoft to the search market is likely to have widespread repercussions for the search marketing sector.

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