MSN Search Launches

John Battelle has it first, and MSN Search is here. The page is not available yet, but I'll keep updating as things come in.



UPDATE: John says that the engine won't be rolled into MSN till sometime in the first half of 2005. The engine is supposed to be currently running either here or here, but so far the second site is down and the first shows the old engine, so I assume the second will start working soon.

MSN Search also launched a blog, to compete with Google's and Yahoo's. So far there is just a "hey there" post. I added the blog's RSS feed to Bloglines, and discovered a search engine integrated into the feed. What an original idea, and a great way to push the new engine! This is the engine, as it appears in the feed reader:



As the below screenshot shows, the interface is similar to the leaked preview we saw a few weeks back, down to the Search Builder feature. There are 5 billion pages indexed, just like we said an hour ago, and a type of local search called "Search Near Me".



The press release says that the engine is already available in 26 markets and 11 languages, and is supposed to be at http://beta.search.msn.com, although it's still not there yet. The Tech Preview site says "The MSN Search Technology Preview is currently unavailable. The site may be down for a short while due to scheduled maintenance. Please try again later."