Microsoft Preps Ground for Homemade Search.

By Kevin Murphy

Microsoft Corp has been working on its own web search technology for well over a year, and this week revamped its MSN Search web site in preparation for the launch of its own back-end search engine, due within a year.

The revamp brings MSN into line with Google Inc, Yahoo! Inc and Ask Jeeves Inc. The page search.msn.com is cleaner, uncluttered. The company claims this redesign can help speed up searching.

The results pages have had the sponsored links broken out into a separate region of the page for clarity. The number of sponsored links has also been reduced, so algorithmic results are more prominent on each query.

Microsoft has also released a "technology preview" of its home-brewed MSN Search, accessible via sandbox.msn.com, which the company hopes will compel useful feedback from webmasters and search enthusiasts.

This preview search engine is built on a one-billion-page index created over the last year by its MSNBot crawlers. Microsoft points out that's it is not finished yet, may run slowly and may not provide the best accuracy or relevancy yet.

Based on a quick non-scientific test run, it appears that the technology preview MSN Search has a way to go before it can seriously threaten the relevance of Google, or even the Yahoo-owned technology it runs currently.

On Google and the Yahoo-powered MSN, a query on "search engine" returns mostly links to search engines. The preview MSN returns mostly links to search optimization services, sites that are specifically designed to game search engines.

Despite the fetal nature of Microsoft's search engine, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo investors were a little jittery yesterday, and both stocks lost value. This was also very likely due to an analyst downgrade of Yahoo.

Yahoo will lose Microsoft's business when MSN Search is finalized. However, Microsoft has made no announcements about replacing Overture as its primary provider of sponsored listings, a far more lucrative contract.