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