MSN Search Engine
The MSN search engine is one of the three major players on the search market (the other two are Google and Yahoo!). MSN is owned by Microsoft, and its history as an independent engine is rather short—MSN only recently started to use its own Web spider to compile the database of webpages. Up until this point, they used Inktomi’s database. The MSN search engine is covered in detail in the articles of this section.
Today what people call a search engine is generally a much more complex Web search portal. It is designed as starting point for users who need to find information on the Web. However, on a search portal, you can find many different search options and services. MSN is featuring Web search and also shows news, weather, links to dozen of sites on the MSN search engine network, and offers from affiliated sites.
Like other major engines, MSN search engine uses spiders to crawl the Web. Therefore, as a crawler based engine, it has spider software, search engine software, an index (database of sites found by spider), and the last important component, a relevancy algorithm. At first, spider software follows the links from the sites kept in the database for finding and changing information. That helps engine to build index of sites. After this stage, information is processed by the help of servers to calculate sites’ relevance. It is widely known that each search engine uses sophisticated and complex algorithms for this purpose.
During the indexing stage, crawler-based engines consider even factors that are not found on your pages. They are so-called “off-the-page” factors, so before putting your page into an index, a crawler will look how many other pages in the index are linking to yours, the text used in links that point to you, what the Page Rank of the linking pages is, whether the page is present in some directories under related categories, as well as other factors. From the other side, you can artificially increase your page relevance by “on-the-page” factors such as using targeted keywords, adjusting the corresponding areas of HTML code, and others, but, of course, you can hardly control other pages in the Internet, those which link to you. Thus, off-the-page relevance prevails in the crawler’s eyes.
To rank highly on MSN search engine, you should build a rather big site. The number of links you garner will also affect your ranking as long as properly chosen primary keywords, which your pages should be focused on, are used. Also, don’t forget about relevant theme of your site. MSN doesn’t use Google’s types of aging delays. This means that if you change the content, the changes in results will be found as soon as the MSN search engine reindex your pages and find your incoming links. These and other rules and techniques will help your site become visible for MSN search engine and not to do idle work as the site’s design is meaningless if your pages are ranked low.
