New MSN Search on PDAs

Last night MSN released a preview/beta of their brand spanking new search engine. It reports to have index over a billion pages, uses a minimalist interface and has the paid advertisements removed. They're asking people out there to pound on it and give feedback.

 

So what do we do? Hit it with our PDA of course. Here are the results on a Pocket PC and also a comparison to Google.

MSN Search:




Google:

 

In general, the default MSN Search works fine on a PDA and the search results seems on par with Google with something like "Spiderman 2". The results Google are optimized for PDAs do you get 5 as opposed to 1 result without scrolling.

 

What we'd like to see: smaller phone and PDA versions like Google has as well as "tel:" urls inserted for phone numbers, that way when we search we can dial a phone number from the search results.

 

So, if you're on a mobile device…tell Microsoft here or here and they'll likely include support for us gadget folks in the forthcoming versions MSN Search.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:26AM]

This doesn't necessarily have to do specifically with the search on a PDA, but more the search results in general.

When I search for Longboarding, it returns 15 results, 9 of which all go to the same site (Silverfish Longboarding which I happen to run :). While that leaves me happy as a lark, it's a stark contrast to Google where 2 of the first 15 point to my site and the rest provide some variety. Looks like they have a decent amount of work to do on their algorithms.