Now that MSN searches have changed its look and search results I thought I might add a bit of new look to see what I could come up with.
All in all I was impressed with the new look even though the current results were not so good.
But is the new MSN so much better?
As you no doubt have heard, MSN Search has changed its look. But there is more to this new look than meets the eye.
I have always been apprehensive about using MSN Search. Not because the results are usually less important than other search engines (although that is always part of the problem) but I never really liked the search results.
To me they were always very full and dark.
But now that there is a new search interface I feel more inclined to use their search engine.
Why, you may ask?
First, I could not put my finger on what was bothering me until MSN changed its appearance. I think it was the blue bars that used to fall at the top and bottom of the search results page.
Now, instead of broad blue bars there are pure silver-gray bars.
Also, the top bar where the search box has become smaller. To me this makes the page look “closed” and less appealing. Now I feel I can trust the results more because it has more space.
I also noticed that MSN was playing with the title presentation. Prior to this change, they appeared to highlight the whole topic, as well as the bold words that accompanied the search query in the caption.
Now, they are still bold words like query in captions but also highlight only search terms like title. Additionally, the font used for both title and caption is minimal.
This helps to create a more relevant search result that makes it easier to find the best match for what you are looking for.
You see, as human beings, we like to take the easy way out. Most of us are users of the search engine "scan and click". We scan the results in the hope that something will "jump" on us. This is how Google became very popular - because they quickly saw that we liked the visual cues to direct us to the web.
MSN has tried this for a while - I found its examples since 2004, but only recently - even a few days ago - there was no consistency in the same names.
If you look at the sponsored results you will see a big difference.
While looking for Firefox searches, I thought I would do a search in Internet Explorer. This is where things got really fun.
While the organic effects were the same, other things caught my eye. First, sponsored ads appear to be much smaller in Firefox than IE. The font size used to display the top and side sponsored ads is smaller than the organic effects. In IE they are the same.
Also, in Firefox I was seeing Yahoo! sponsored results, however on IE I could see Microsoft-sponsored results.
Of course, I have seen various results providers supported depending on the browser I was using.
Even the layout of sponsored ads was different. With Firefox and Yahoo! ads, the top support is extended across the page and the sponsored side starts in the same line as the biological effect, creating a large blank space in the top right corner of the page.
However in the IE browser with MSN ads, that empty space disappeared and the side-by-side ad ads went up to match the higher sponsored results. Make the page look more organized.
I looked at the CSS and JavaScripts used on the page to see if they were probably doing some sort of browser detection before rendering the page but I saw nothing but IE style fixes on Mac.
After all, this is just the beginning of a new MSN look game. I expect that they will continue to repair and repair until it is ready. As a result, if you try to test the same thing I did (with a separate browser test) you may not see the same results.
In the end I have to say, the side effects, the new look is very attractive and at least for me it makes it easier to accept the results. I do not feel frustrated by the small space we used to have.
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