Microsoft's beta MSN Search

The beta of Microsoft's new MSN Search is out. 

Fast and lots of advanced search options.  Didn't return as many results as Google does to my sample queries, though, so not a Google-killer yet.  Press and the blogger pundits seem interested but underwhelmed.

But that's why they call it a beta, right?  Microsoft certainly has the resources to do it right.

Thomas Hawk has interesting advice for Microsoft:

"Now if you want an idea to help you pull search from Google, how about this -- proprietary search results. What do I mean by this? Find sources of content that are not presently indexed by Google and Yahoo! and offer exclusive indexing of this content through your search engine. You could start by working out a deal with the networks to be the exclusive provider of all indexed closed captioned transcripts since they've been collecting them.Now if you want an idea to help you pull search from Google, how about this -- proprietary search results. What do I mean by this? Find sources of content that are not presently indexed by Google and Yahoo! and offer exclusive indexing of this content through your search engine. You could start by working out a deal with the networks to be the exclusive provider of all indexed closed captioned transcripts since they've been collecting them."

Interesting idea -- though good luck trying to pry transcripts from any of the major networks <g>. One of the great things Google did early was to buy and then incorporate a searchable database of all Usenet posts via the Google Groups option.  I found the ability to search for information on web pages and also in Usenet invaluable.  Usenet's successor these days seems to be the blogsphere -- maybe new and better ways to search/track information there would help MSN Search too. Blog-centric services like Technorati and Feedster exist already, but I've always found them to be slow and to do fairly poor job returning relevant results.