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February 22, 2005 12:31 AM
Broken: Searching MSN for a URL
For more fun, try searching MSN for www.thisisbroken.com.
Thanks to Ari Becker.
That's not a results page for MSN Search. It's an error page IE redirects to when it can't find a specific domain. The page always says "We can't find X" where X is the domain name supplied by IE.
The MSN Search results for "www.thisisbroken.com" are here: http://sea.search.msn.com/results.aspx?&q=www.thisisbroken.com
It finds this site just fine.
i dont know how you found it with the msn search.
i did my own search from msn.com, typing in 'www.thisisbroken.com' into the search bar.
i got a different looking page, but it still didnt find it.
trying to compare, i did the same search on google and yahoo and both of those were able to find it with the first result.
however this could all be fixed by simply typing in 'thisisbroken' without all the www and .com business in there...
I've watched hours of usability testing and have often seen people type URLs into search boxes. Enough people do it that a good search engine should def. be able to resolve a URL and, if not send the user directly to the URL, at least return search results. Broken.
MSN is broken. Try typing "thisisbroken.com" into Yahoo! or google. Voila! A link back to this site.
From personal experience, I occasionally type partial addresses into search engines. Especially if it is a longer adresss or I can't remember the whole thing.
I agree that a search engine should at least present a list of possible results.
I'm not saying this isn't broken - in my opinion, it is. However, I was impressed with one thing about MSN search - I run a small business's website, at www.workingiron.ca. On the first day it went live, if I typed Working Iron into the MSN search box, I got our site right away. If I typed it in at google, it was generally on about the 2nd or 3rd page (this is after about 6 months of the site being live, and linked to from as many other places as I could get it). I do realize that google ranks by links to the site. At the same time, I think it makes sense for a search engine to rank sites with those exact words, in that exact order, in the domain name, before listing others. This helps make a business/person/whatever findable. If I'm looking for a business named "Working Iron", the most plausible place to find it would be at the site www.workingiron.something. This should be easy to rank near the top.
Actually, the last time I had tried this was a few weeks ago - it's now at the top of the list at google! Yay google!
Isaac: not all search engines work that way. Many rank results based on words in the page/site. Google was the first (that I know of) to use the 'rank by reference' method. The basics are published in research papers from when the two creators were grad students at Stanford (I think it was Stanford).
I might not have been clear. When I said "on the first day it went live", I meant on the first day MSN's new search went live.
You could type "http://sea.search.msn.com/results.aspx?&q=www.MISC GIBERISH!.com" and it would still come up as "We can't find www.MISC GIBBERISH!.com"
Defineitly not broken.
i think that last post clears this up pretty well...
search for 'www.thisisbroken.com' and it wont find anything, but tell you to search for 'thisisbroken' which gives a hit on the first result.
if this is too much for anyone...well...maybe he or she should just stay away from computers...
No, it's not broken if you type thisisbroken.com. If you type wwww.thisisbroken.com, then you get that error message. Clear enough yet?
I don't think that is broken. While it doesn't make much sense to us, it does give you an option that gives you the results you are looking for.
MSN could easily design it so that it discards the WWW. and .COM and performs the search. But in order for this to be broken, it has to prevent you from accomplishing what you need to accomplish. It doesn't prevent that, just adds an extra step.
Hey romano,
maybe you get the error message because there are only suppoused to be 3 w's in a url. duh
my god...who the f* cares. You are all a bunch of morons with too much time on your hands. And, I'm one too. For wasting 3 minutes of my life that I will never get back reading the thread, and addressing this message.
Problem Finder: Dipstick. There aren't "supposed" to be anything in a URL. A URL is simply an address for something that somebody made up. In the case of domain names, the third set of letters (reading from RIGHT to LEFT.. first is com, second is thisisbroken, third is www...this is the way DNS works) is called the "subdomain," and can be anything the owner wishes for it to be, including "wwww," "id10t," or "youreawankerformakingmewastemytimepostinglikethis"...
Why do you need to use a search engine to find a website that you already know really well and its URL? What a waste of time!!! Maybe you are broken! But, for your sake, MSN fixed up this problem. Go, ahead. It works now!
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Previous: Restaurant website | Main | Next: Included batteries
I'm confused, are you saying that MSN is broken?
Search engines index and rank results based on links to websites. thisisbroken.com is only a redirect to broken.typepad.com, so no one actually links to thisisbroken.com
not broken.
Posted by: Isaac at February 22, 2005 03:02 AM