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Google vs MSN Search

March 2007 | The two browsers I use regularly are Firefox and Opera. Both have Google search built in. But I've bookmarked several others. In the search engine wars things change. Rivals improve. If I don't find what I'm looking for in the first page of Google results I switch.

For highly competitive keywords Google's algorithm is better at filtering out spam, but for non-commercial keywords the relevance of MSN results is really quite good.

To see the difference between Google and MSN Live Search spam-wise, take a look at this comparison chart for a highly competitive pair of keywords. I've highlighted page titles for the most aggressively promoted product in the category.

Since this article was first written there appear to have been changes in the way MSN Live ranks pages. All the major search engines are tweaking their algorithms more frequently than they did in the past. Consequently, I sometimes use Dogpile.com which combines results from all the major search engines.

Google's other anti-spam penalties are wide-ranging and really quite draconian. It's quite easy for web page authors to inadvertently trigger penalties if they are not familiar with best practices in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It's also possible for other sites to damage your ranking by the way they construct links to your site (innocently or intentionally).

Beware: Many SEO articles are out of date and refer to search engine methods that have long since been revised or superseded. Often, no date is shown in the articles.

Ranking and penalties

Although patents have been published, all the major search engines keep the details of how they implement their algorithms a closely guarded secret. I've spent a great deal of time reading through the zillions of articles by SEO specialists that can be found by searching with appropriate keywords. What I've found is that they haven't all reached exactly the same conclusions about how the anti-spam tactics and ranking algorithms work.

The most useful summary I came across was Vaughn Aubuchon's Google Ranking Factors Checklist.

PageRank or StaleRank?

Google's PageRank (TM) algorithm calculates "link popularity" for web pages, which it then uses as a weighting factor to position pages in the results. Consequently, old sites generally have a higher rank than equally good new sites, and sometimes the content is ancient.

A personal experience

Early in 2005 I set up a message board for reading groups in Devon. Despite an article in a local magazine and notices in libraries and bookshops the response was minimal. In June 2005, I removed the message board and replaced it with a link to information about reading groups in public libraries. At the beginning of February 2006, Google still had cached pages for the non-existent message board and another deleted page. Google's index may be the largest, but who knows how many pages it contains that no longer exist. MSN had recent cached pages for the site when this article was written. On the other hand, the total number of blog posts on BlogSpot.com could well exceed the entire size of Google's index by now.

Cached pages

Google results sometimes show links to cached pages which don't exist. That doesn't happen often with MSN Live search, although occasionally I have to click "Refresh" to bring up the MSN cached page.

Google highlights keywords on cached pages, unless the pages are in the "Supplemental Results" index. Highlighting makes it easier to locate relevant content within a page. MSN doesn't apply keyword highlighting. As a consequence, I have come to rely on Opera 9 to highlight keywords.

Google keyword highlighting:
"Should webpages be spelled as web page or webpage?"

If there are two or more keywords, Google highlights them with different colors. It doesn't highlight keywords if they are embedded in longer words. Opera 9 treats keywords as character strings, not actual words surrounded by white space.

Opera 9 keyword highlighting:
"Should webpages be spelled as web page or webpage?"

Opera 9 highlights the first occurrence with a yellow background and subsequent occurrences with a green background and red text. Unlike Google's cached pages, if you type two or more keywords, Opera 9 treats them as a quoted group, not separate keywords.


Homepage: a review of 3 free website trackers (hit counters). Includes browser chart examples for each tracker.