New study argues that MSN Search gives the best search results.

Microsoft’s search engine has been prominent in the news lately.

Amazon and Alexa have started using Windows Live Search instead of Google for their web search results. Ask.com’s CEO Steve Berkowitz is to start working with Microsoft. Steve Ballmer is boasting about Microsofts’s gains vis-a-vis Google and Yahoo.

For the time being Microsoft Search is far behind Google as regards users, but that might change. Christopher Payne, who is responsible for Windows Live Search, says to Associated Press that “I think we’ll look back on this as the DOS era of search.” Hm.

We are familiar with Microsoft using big words. Therefore it is interesting to read a new report on search engine result relevance. The report is produced by Intralink, a search engine optimization and web marketing consultancy firm in Cincinnati.

The findings and the methodology used are found at Seoresourcecenter.com. Intralink has covered Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, Ask.com, AOL Search, Gigablast and Wisenut but not the French search engine Exalead.

Intralink has checked on five criteria or variables, namely: “relevancy”, “freshness of content”, “failure rate”, “difficult search results” and “non-organic or extra features”.

Surprisingly the top score is given to MSN Search, ahead of Google (although not with a large margin). When it comes to “relevancy” Google is behind both MSN Search and Yahoo!
On the other hand, Google is the leader concerning “Freshness of content”, where both Yahoo! and Ask.com are performing surprisingly badly.

Does this mean that MSN really is better than Google? It is hard to say, as the margins of error are large. However, what the report may indicate, is that MSN is catching up quality-wise, which is important, as it was quality and relevance of search results that made Google the dominant player on the search engine arena.

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Right now Google is still king as far as search engine popularity and prominence is concerned. Competition between the search engines is a wonderful thing. Just like any other industry competition will help accelerate innovation and improvements, which should benefit the consumers.

I definitely think MSN will gain some major ground on Google over the next several years. Whether MSN is able to take users from Google, or does Yahoo start to see it's demise nearing. It seems like every several years a couple of the major search engines fall from prominence to the graveyard.

Look at what happened to Alta Vista, Hot Bot, AlltheWeb, Excite, WebCrawler, and InfoSeek. All of these search engines were popular and almost common household names, now they are either totally dead or spam filled wastelands that only uninformed surfers still use.

I don't think the battle of MSN and Google will result in a fate like this to Yahoo, but if Yahoo isn't ready to keep up they may be the real losers in the Search Engine Wars. Yahoo has been a solid SE for so long I think many people will stay loyal to it, but it's market share of searches may fall to around 15%.