Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

As promised, MSN has launched their beta version of their new search engine today. It is making waves in the media, even though MSN has been uncharacteristically quiet about it. Perhaps part of the reason for their relative silece is that this is just a beta launch and they plan on tweaking their search engine quite a bit before it goes primetime. Or maybe they realized that sometimes people pay more attention if you kind of keep it a secret. They could also be trying Google's famous "it's still in beta" trick (you know the one where they say their service is in beta forever, i.e. Froogle, Google News, etc.)

For now, the only place I'm seeing the new results is on the beta search site: beta.search.msn.com It appears to be the same results I was seeing on the most recent version of the tech preview. (I liked the results better before the most recent tweaks).

I haven't had time to experiement with it yet, but this new MSN search is supposed to provide personalized search options as well as local searching (sound familiar?).

Here are some links to other resources about the beta launch of MSN's new search engine:

Press Release about the Beta launch of the new MSN Search
MSN Search Beta Fact Sheet

John Battelle
Andy Beal
Chris Sherman
News.com
Clickz
NY Times (login required)