This doesn’t officially launch until tomorrow, but I just happened to stumble across the URL so I thought I should get a jump on posting about it. Here goes my brief comparison between Google and MSN Search…
Visual Appearance of home search page:
MSN Search: Plenty of whitespace, simple, clean, and elegant design. The text links are a little bit difficult to recognize as links.
Google: Again, plenty of whitespace, clean appearance. Links are easy to distinguish. Large, rather ugly logo.
Winner: Although the difference are slight, I honestly find MSN Search to be easier on the eyes. I’ve never been a huge fan of the rather massive “Google” logo on their search page. Therefore MSN Search wins.
Other Features Available from the home search page:
MSN Search: MSN Home · My MSN · Hotmail · Messenger · News · Sports · Entertainment · Weather · More…
Google: Web · Images · Groups · News · Froogle · Language Tools · more »
Winner:Tied. Based solely purely on numbers it is a draw, but based entirely on services provided they are very different in the features they offer, but in my opinion just about equal.
A simple test search: “gmail AND pop”
Note: Google annouced today they would begin allowing POP access to gmail accounts, this represents breaking news that has filtered through the internet today
MSN Search: Nunber of results: 56,800. Most of the results are about “Pop goes the Gmail” …not what we were looking for.
Google: Number of results: 450,000. The first search results is “Gmail Users Soon Able to Check E-Mail Via Outlook” …Bingo.
Winner:The winner is Google because it found the information we were looking for, though I admit the search wasn’t very specific. Also, MSN Search hasn’t had the time yet to build an index comparable in size to Google’s some-odd 8 Billion indexed sites. Watch for this to change very quickly though.
I will continue comparing these two as new categories come to mind. Either way, it looks like these two will become the best overall search engines available. I look forward to seeing where Google can innovate and I am equally excited to see how MSN Search competes with the established search standard.
To quote some anonymous tech guru, “You know you’ve (referring to Google) made it big when your name becomes a verb.” This is in reference to the explosion of “googling” to find something on the internet. Who knows? Maybe we will be “MSNing” a year from now.
Wandering the Interwebs 