Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Interested in seeing MSN's new search engine? Take a look at the MSN Sandbox. They've opened up their alpha test of the new search engine to curious webmasters or whoever cares what MSN is up to. I haven't done a lot of experimenting with it yet, but so far, the results seem very relevant. You see results that are a lot different from what you see at Google and Yahoo, but very relevant. Some people I've talked to about it say these new MSN results are the most relevant they've seen from any of the major search engines.

I'm not sure when MSN will feel confident enough with their new search engine to have it replace Yahoo's results, but they seem to be moving in that direction. Today's changes to their search engine including simplifying the search page and filtering out Yahoo paid inclusion lead me to believe they are on their way towards that goal. I expect the full transition will happen before the end of the year, possibly within the next couple months.

I wouldn't be surprised to see MSN speed things up with the release of their new search with Google's upcoming IPO in the works. They want to make sure they don't lose any more of the market share Google's already taken, and I'm sure they'll make a big push to get some of those users back.