Picsearch announced collaboration with MSN: Picsearch announced that it has entered into an agreement to supply the new MSN Search service with image search services. This means that MSN consumers may search for electronic images on the Internet using technology made available by Picsearch.

Nils Andersson, CEO of Picsearch, said:

I am very excited that Picsearch's technology will be used to find images on the Web for this worldwide service. MSN shares our desire to be at the forefront of the net search market. Picsearch will continue providing the highest quality image search service in the world. New features are always being developed.

Justin Osmer, product manager at MSN, said:

The new MSN Search service offers a large index to help consumers quickly and easily find the information that is of interest to them. MSN is proud to team up with Picsearch to offer a vast index of high-quality images that are relevant to our consumers' queries.

About Picsearch Picsearch creates leading image search solutions that power visual search for many of the Web's leading properties. The company syndicates its technology to search engines and portals to enable them to complete their own search package by acquiring powerful image search capabilities. By enhancing the service that they can offer to their users, Picsearch's syndication partners benefit from increased user-traffic and higher revenue. Since Picsearch's inception in 2000, its syndication partners have come to include top Internet properties MSN, Ask Jeeves Inc and Lycos Europe GmbH.

Via SE Roundtable

MSN has updated its news search engine called MSN Newsbot.

MSN Newsbot now groups similar stories together with a single summary and allows the reader to select the site where they want to read the full version.

They also give the list of the publishers indexed in MSN Newsbot (about 6900 publishers are listed there, but they mention only 4800 sources in their description).

In addition to the new UI features, the Newsbot team has been working hard on ways to get the important stories on the page faster and adding three new markets: Australia and both Canada (English & French).

Source: Todd Colby (Program Manager) - MSN Search blog

Bill Gates officially launches MSN Search on MSN.com's homepage:

Greetings,

I would like to introduce you to the new MSN Search service and MSN.com home page.

Based on your feedback, we have designed the new MSN.com home page to be faster, simpler, and more organized. We've also made MSN Search more precise and powerful, so you can quickly find the information you're looking for.

Our mission at Microsoft is to use the power of software to solve our customers' toughest problems. Searching the Internet today is a challenge, and it is estimated that nearly half of customers' complex questions go unanswered. That's why we're proud of our new MSN Search service, a simple and powerful tool that helps you find the answers you want from sources as diverse as Web pages, images, news headlines, music downloads, and even files on your PC.

Input from millions of our customers - including me - was crucial to our efforts to make MSN Search the best it can be. If you have not already tried it, I encourage you to visit www.msn.com and type in your question. We'd love to hear what you think, and I promise that we will continue to improve MSN based on your feedback.

Sincerely,

Bill Gates

Check out also the announcement by Christopher Payne (Corporate VP, MSN Search) on MSN Search blog:

I am proud and excited to announce that MSN Search is now officially launched.

With this final push we have made more than 40,000 Encarta encyclopedia articles and associated media available for free to MSN Search users, which translates to more than 1.5 million Instant Answers. We also improved and integrated Newsbot, added a button for RSS feeds on the bottom of all applicable search results pages, and increased our MSN Music selection.

We have been doing a ton behind the scenes over the last few weeks as well, tuning performance and working on scaling the system to handle MSN’s volume.

In conjunction with all this, MSN has launched a redesigned MSN.com homepage. The page is streamlined, over 50% faster and showcases the new search functionality. This will give users a great place to start their search experience. Furthermore we’ve added the ability to access MSN Search from the Microsoft.com homepage. What is most exciting to me is we now have a search platform in place that we can innovate on top of at a rapid pace. Thanks to all of you who provided feedback during the beta and tech previews ­ Keep it coming. The next year is going to be extremely exciting.

Thanks

To check your MSN search ranking (or your competitors ranking) you can use this ranking software

The MSN Portal team had a “little” launch early last week; they added the ability to read RSS (and Atom) feeds on the My MSN page. Users can add an individual blog’s feed or an RSS search feed or an MSN Search Results feed (MSN provides RSS feeds of search results pages).

They also launched a site for listing all of the available MSN RSS feeds – right now, there are feeds for MSN Music, MSN Autos and MSNBC with more to come.

New from MSN today are a few more local versions of their Newsbot news search beta. Online today:

• Newsbot Australia
• Newsbot Canada
• Newsbot Canada (French)

Here is the list of all available versions:

Europe: Belgium France Germany Ireland Italy Spain Switzerland (French) Switzerland (German) United Kingdom

Americas: Canada Canada (French) Latin America U.S. (Spanish) United States

Africa: South Africa

Asia: India Indonesia Malaysia Philippines Singapore

Australia: Australia

(From SEW blog)

MSN beta loves new tool and extension!

Through its official blog, MSN promotes new tool and extension designed for its new beta search engine.

We’ve found quite a few people have added on extensions to the beta. It’s great to see more people playing with the new engine. Here’s a tool from DEVPPL that can be used to evaluate your rank on the Beta. Martin created an MSN Search Beta desktop widget. And Ryan has created a Firefox plug-in for the Beta. Thanks for your contributions!

I like this MSN comments :=)

Related tool for MSN Beta:

• Software to check your rankings or your competitors rankings on MSN beta

Related articles on MSN beta tool and extension:

• MSN blog: Search Beta Extensions
• MSN Rank Checker & Other Gadgets
• MSN Search Embraces Screen Scraping Rank Checker

MSN launched MSN Spaces, its new blogging service.

The MSN Spaces beta version is a free service available in 14 languages and 26 markets worldwide. MSN Spaces was designed to make it easy for consumers to create and maintain a personal Web site, bringing the power and benefits of blogging to millions of Internet users, regardless of their level of technical expertise. More than a blogging tool, MSN Spaces is a dynamic online scrapbook where consumers can share photo albums, personal music lists and more. And more than an ordinary personal Web site, through seamless integration with MSN Messenger and MSN Hotmail, MSN Spaces will automatically notify online contacts when a person's Space has been updated so his or her online community knows when it is time to pay a visit. People can sign up for MSN Spaces through MSN Messenger or by going to http://spaces.msn.com. Key features of the service include the following:

• Control your Space. Consumers can choose the people who visit their Space through three levels of permissions: public, MSN Messenger contacts only or private.
• Use pictures and music to say more. MSN Spaces enable consumers to easily display their pictures via a photo album slide show. Consumers can easily share playlists through their Space with Microsoft® Windows Media® technologies. With just two clicks, people can sample or purchase a song on someone's playlist through MSN Music.
• Create an extension of yourself. Contact Cards - a new addition to MSN Messenger and Hotmail - are windows into a consumer's Space, mirroring its look and the most recent information posted. MSN Spaces also supports RSS, so consumers can publish their Space to others by way of RSS viewers and aggregators - including My MSN, coming soon.
• Post remote updates. Consumers can post updates to their Space remotely via e-mail or a mobile phone.
• Make it your own. Fifteen custom backgrounds and five layout templates give consumers a way to quickly customize and personalize their Space.

Read Nathan Weinberg's first impressions about MSN Spaces

What's going to make the difference between the 3 Search giants Google, Yahoo! and MSN?

• All of them have a search engine with a design more and more similar...
• All of them have a blog (MSN just opened its blog)
• All of them have a toolbar
• All of them try to have the bigger index
• and so on...

Maybe the users will make their choice, mainly based on relevance.