ClickZ: MSN Search Gets New Look; Microsoft Gets New Search Engine, Part 2

Search Guru Danny Sullivan tries to be nice, but his two-part review of Microsoft's recent changes to its search interface concludes that the changes just aren't very significant, despite Microsoft's public claims that this is the biggest search upgrade in its history.

Interface elements aside, Sullivan looks at the underlying search engine itself and notes that there have been some changes, but not all for the positive. In particular, he points to the absence of LookSmart data, what seems to be a smaller subset of the Yahoo data in Microsoft's results and the cessation of creating human-edited search results for the most popular queries - the one major feature that Microsoft used to have over its search competitors.

Microsoft plans to switch in its own homegrown technology later in the year, although Sullivan said that previews of that technology haven't shown it to be superior to its competitors in any way - at least not yet.