Some have blogged about the “new” MSN search recently. Compared with the efforts of A9 (ever tried this yellow pages gimmick with photographs of whole streets to “walk along”?) or Google Suggest (kind of autocompletion for search terms) its pretty “oldschool”.

The design actually looks much like a MSN theme for google. The cached page link, the “more results from this server” thing - these were introduced to the broad marked by google, while most other search engines don’t do this. Except for MSN Search, which copied that. Same for the sponsored links.

The german version of MSN is picky about search terms it allows. (apart from having obvious bugs wrt quoting of special characters)

The funny thing, while germany usually is a lot more liberal (our conservatives are not that bad), MSN search in germany filters search terms. Not search results, but search terms.
This lead to the funny reply that you cannot search for “Staatsexamen” (“state exam”, a university exam done by state rules and state standards)

  • MSN concluded that this was composed of “staat sex amen” (“state sex amen”) and therefore is adult content. Also you cannot search for “Möpse”, which is a dog breed (I think the english term is “pugs”), because that is sometimes used for “boobs”.

Yeah, with this post my blog will probably be XXX-rated by MSN and I will disappear from their search universe…