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New MSN Search Engine: How Good Is It?

If you have an online business or you just use Internet as one of your marketing tools, you know that how important are the search engines in your quest to get more targeted visitors to your website. The changes in search engine field can have unexpected outcome for your online endeavors. That’s why it is important to be well-informed on impending progress in this sphere.

Microsoft has recently come out with the latest beta version of its much touted search engine. Supported by 5 billion indexed pages, it is poised to become one of the most powerful search engines in the market. Right now MSN is using Yahoo provided search results for queries done through its search page, which it’s planning to change somewhere in early next year with its own. You can check out the search engine at http://beta.search.msn.com.

Google’s immense success and profitable business model enticed Microsoft and others to look into lucrative search engine market seriously. Amazon, for example, has recently launched its web search site A9.com. Today, Google carries out almost 50 percent of all searches on the Internet. Yahoo with 24 percent of the market share is trailing in a distant second place. MSN with 14 percent lags far behind from the competitors – a situation, which won’t be very easy to change.

However, Microsoft has a long history of copying booming products; make their replicas some times, arguably, better then the originals, and clinch larger portion of the market shares. Microsoft has successfully done this to Borland’s dominance of programming languages in the early days. The list of victims continued with once utterly popular word processor –WordPerfect, market dominant spreadsheet – Lotus 1-2-3, Novell’s Netware and finally Netscape. Since 90 percents of all personal computers run on Windows, Microsoft gets an extra edge against its competitors, which it’s capable of exploiting very effectively.

What is new in MSN search?

This version of MSN search incorporated several interesting features, which other search engines are lacking at this moment.

Direct answers to plain language factual searches

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Askjeeves has better ability to find answers to direct plain language searches. MSN search has taken this one step further by adding Microsoft's Encarta reference tools to its features. Ask, what is the capital of Russia? You will get the right answer at the beginning of the result page. Questions like “What is the size of a Blue whale?” also brings in exact answer. No doubt, students will love this feature as it makes a lot easier for them to get specific answers to the questions related to facts and figures.

Near me

Microsoft's new search engine includes a ''near me'' button that helps users find websites for a given location. In this release, this works only in United States.

Once you press this button MSN search figures out where are you located using your computer’s IP address. However, this can be easily superseded by changing setting preferences. This is important if you are located in New York and looking for something near Boston.

Search Builder

In other search engines, if you would like to customize your search you have to use advance search options from a separate page. MSN search has made it a lot easier for average users by adding the ability of customization right on the search box.

Once you click on the Search Builder from the link right underneath of the search box a drop down menu will open. Initially, the menu might look a little confusing; with little patience you will be able to use available great features easily.

The tool “search terms” allows you to add Boolean search options. Site/ Domain tool is used for limiting a search to specific site or domain, or excluding them from your query. “Links to” tool helps you make your query within the sites linked to a specific site. Country/ region and language options are required to make geography or language specific searches.

The best option from this group of features is the “Result Ranking”. This option allows you to refine searches and give you a better control over the search result by using a set of three bars. By sliding the bars up and down you choose whether you want to see more of exact match or approximate match, more popular or less popular, static or dynamic pages as search results. You can generate an impressive range of results for a single query thanks to this option. This could be very useful for some types of searches. For example: if you are looking for news based pages, you might prefer to choose more dynamic pages rather than static ones.

Preference setting

Most notable options on the setting page are “Safe Search” – ability to filter out sexually explicit images and texts, and ability to fix the number of results displayed from one particular site.

Relevancy

Many reviewers claim that if you compare the search results with Google, MSN search engine “falls short” in relevancy. However, my results showed otherwise.

I ran a search on the phrase “trade leads”. The results from both the search engines were very relevant. The only difference in MSN I noticed is our http://trade-leads.rusbiz.com managed to turn up on the first page. But, a search on the word “e-catalog” was brought better – more relevant – results on MSN then Google. This time too I was happy to see http://e-catalog.rusbiz.com on the first page of MSN search results.

Conclusion

If you consider all the new features of MSN that Google does not have yet, its ability to cover natural language queries, quality level and relevance of results, ability to refine searches, there is no doubt that MSN search engine is as good as Google.

Nowshade Kabir
15 May 2007

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at mailto:nowshade@rusbiz.com

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20 Must-Have Tools to Automate an Online Business

With all the information online about tools and techniques available to help someone effectively manage and run an online business, how do you ever decide which ones are truly useful to have in your business management toolkit? Here's my listing of the 20 indispensable tools that I cannot live without:

1. Article Marketing: SubmitYourArticle.com automates the article submission process by allowing you to submit up to eight articles each month and then distributes the articles to hundreds of web sites, article directories and ezine publishers. Without a doubt, this has been my most effective online marketing tool that has produced tremendous results for my business.

2. Audio Recording/Podcasting: AudioAcrobat.com makes audio streaming fast and simple, whether you want to add an audio greeting, audio testimonials, podcast or videos to your website or send out an audio postcard or record a teleclass.

3. Backup: Carbonite.com offers an unlimited amount of data storage for $50 per year. Carbonite is very intuitive and went directly to my email files and Roboform files to back them up without me having to manually select the backup files. I frequently use this service to find the original version of a file that I've accidentally overwritten, as well.

4. Blogging: Typepad.com is both simple to use and powerful. You can set up as many blogs as you desire with a Pro account, and you can customize your blog in an infinite number of ways. Once it's set up, the online interface makes it a snap to make new posts to your blog.

5. Bookmark Manager: SPURL.net makes managing a moderate to massive amount of bookmarks very easy. You create any number of categories in which to file your favorites, and adding a favorite website is as easy as clicking a button.

6. Color Matching: Pixie is a tool that I use daily to help me match a color exactly for a document that I'm creating or a color I'm trying to replicate on a website. Run it, simply point to a color and it will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color.

7. Content Management: Edit.com is a website maintenance service that makes your current website editable so you can change the content yourself. They handle everything to get your site set up and provide you with telephone training to walk you through your first edits. There is no software to install because it just uses your web browser. At no chärge, you can have them review your website to ensure that your site is compatible with their service.

8. Email Líst Management/Autoresponders: aWeber.com is a great service for creating, mailing and reporting back on the success of your newsletter as well as to subscribe your readers to a sequential autoresponder, either associated with your newsletter or with another product. I love to be able to see how many readers opened my newsletter, who opened the newsletter, and what links they clicked on from the newsletters.

9. Fax: MaxEmail.com lets you send and receive faxes through the Internet/email and makes your need for a fax machine obsolete. The faxes arrive in PDF format, so you can easily share you faxes with others as needed. They also offër voice mail on your fax line, and the voicemail message arrives as an audio file in your email inbox.

10. Graphics Program: SnagIt.com lets you show someone exactly what you see on your screen. Select and capture your screen image and send it to SnagIt's editor to add professional effects, edit the image (resize, adjust color), and or drop it into your favorite application.

11. Hostíng: Aaces.com offers the ability to buy a hostíng plan in which you can host and manage a large number of websites through one account rather than buying multiple hostíng plans for each website for your business. And, their customer service can't be beat.

12. Idea Management: With EverNote.com you can easily store and quickly access typed and handwritten memos, webpage excerpts, emails, telephone messages, addresses, passwords, brainstorms, sketches, documents and more! A free version or a 30-day tríal of the paid version is available for download.

13. Merchant Account: PracticePaySolutions.com offers an all-in-one ecommerce solution that helps you take payment online. The coolest feature that they offër in this service is the ability to do batch uploads of charges, so if you have a number of clients on retainer that you invoice every month, you can simply create a spreadsheet and batch upload the data rather than entering each client's information individually.

14. Publicity Tracker: Google Alerts lets you type in an unlimited number of search terms, like your name, your company name, your industry, the name of your competitors, etc. Google will then deliver an email alert for any mention of your search term online. This is a wonderful way to track your own PR as well as industry trends.

15. Password Management: Roboform.com is the top-rated password manager and web förm filler that completely automates password entering and förm filling. You'll nevër have to remember a password again! I maintain both my passwords and user info and that of my clients in this program.

16. Shopping Cart: KickstartCart.com is easy to use and setup, and offers the ability to create affilíate programs, follow up with prospective and current customers with autoresponders, create coupons for limited-time offers, as well as enable buyers to immediately download electronic purchases (ebooks, audio files). There is a free 30-day tríal, but don't sign up until you have the time to test drive it--30 days goes by fast!

17. Spyware: CounterSpy.com will protect your computer from spyware, adware, Trojans and other malware threats.

18. Teleconference Line: LiveOfficeFreeConferencing.com lets you meet with colleagues, associates or even family members through a teleconference bridge line that can bring up to 250 people together at one place over a teleconference telephone line. You can use the line to conduct classes and training and record your calls, as well as manage your participants from an online interface.

19. Time Tracker: TraxTime.com has helped me keep track of my consulting projects for years. You simply create projects and clock into and out of them, with the ability to write memos about how you've used your time.

20. To Do Líst Management: Accomplice.com works online and offline, integrates with Outlook and other software you already use, and syncs with your PDA. What I love most about this software is that I can create in-depth, hierarchical to-do lists (tasks and sub-tasks of a bígger project) very easily, and add additional tasks on the fly as they occur to me. I can see at any point what are my more important tasks and what is coming due soon.

Try out these tools with the tríal offers provided and see how your business becomes easier to manage!

Donna Gunter
01 June 2007

Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet and get more clients online. To claim your Frëe gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at GetMoreClientsOnline.com . Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at AskDonnaGunter.com .

The Pure gold of this course was the Butterfly Marketing Manuscript.