Tech: Start Your Search Engines!

It was supposed to be a quiet little beta test. But the preview version of Microsoft’s new Internet-search technology at techpreview.search.msn.com generated so much buzz that on July 1, the day it went live, the site was unusable at times. Even when people were able to execute a search, chances are the results weren’t as good as what they could have got with rivals Yahoo or Google. That’s because the MSN site currently indexes only 1 billion Web pages (vs. the 4 billion to 6 billion typical of top competitors). It will be in the testing phase for as long as a year, according to Larry Grothaus, lead product manager for MSN.