This morning I tried out the MSN Search Beta and was suitably impressed. There were some availability issues last night which led some to proclaim the new MSN search: an unmitigated disaster. However today things are running fine.

I tried the following queries on both services and got some interesting results

1. "dare obasanjo"

   Google Result	Description
   http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/	My current personal weblog
   http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/Carnage4Life/diary	My former personal weblog
   http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo	My current work-related weblog
   http://www.xml.com/pub/au/142	My author page on XML.com
   http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml01202003.asp	The most popular article from my Extreme XML column on MSDN

   MSN Search (beta) Result	Description
   http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/	My current personal weblog
   http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo	My current work-related weblog
   http://www.xml.com/pub/au/142	My author page on XML.com
   http://www.rssbandit.org/ow.asp?DareObasanjo	My personal page on the RSS Bandit wiki
   http://www.afriguru.com/2004/dare-obasanjo.html	A blog post that refers to me as a Nigerian XML expert

2. "rss bandit" OR rssbandit

   Google Result	Description
   http://www.rssbandit.org/	The RSS Bandit webpage
   http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=cb8d3173-9f65-46fe-bf17-122e3703bb00	The former RSS Bandit project page on GotDotNet Workspaces
   http://sourceforge.net/projects/rssbandit	The current RSS Bandit project page on SourceForge
   http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/5/16/135349/207	A post in my former blog about RSS Bandit
   http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2004/01/04/47392.aspx	A review of RSS Bandit by Roy Osherove

   MSN Search (beta) Result	Description
   http://www.rssbandit.org/	The RSS Bandit webpage
   http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml02172003.asp	The first article I wrote about RSS Bandit on MSDN
   http://www.marketingwithrss.com/rss-bandit-or-rssbandit/	SPAM
   http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=RSS%20Bandit	Posts from the RSS Bandit category of my current weblog
   http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Technical_Services/Cataloguing/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/News_Readers/	A catalog of RSS readers

The results from MSN Search were pertinent and in some cases moreso than the Google ones. Although MSN Search did allow a spam entry to make it into the top 5 results it also returned a link to all the RSS Bandit related posts on my blog which Google didn't pick up. Well, it doesn't look so inconceivable anymore that Microsoft will give Google a run for their money.

Then just wait until you see launch version of MSN Spaces and compare it to Blogger (although I'd prefer comparisons to LiveJournal or TypePad). The next few years are going to be fun.