Up until this week, MSN depended on others for its back-end search technology.
When Ken Moss was asked to create a team to build a new search engine based on Microsoft technologies, work on the new search engine began with close collaboration between the MSN Search team and Microsoft Research.
"Early on, it was very daunting, because we had a huge mission and very few people to work on it," says Moss. "But while we weren't fully staffed, we had deep ties to Microsoft Research, so there were a lot of experts we could pull into the process in areas like Web crawling, index serving and measuring relevance. It's been a phenomenal partnership, and we wouldn't be shipping now without their help."
The MSN Search team opted to take an incremental approach to tackling the challenges involved.
"We started out by breaking everything down into small pieces. Then we'd prototype, test, even throw things away and start over when necessary," Moss recalls. "Our index has five billion documents today. Our first index had exactly twenty-four. Then we built it up to five hundred. Then two thousand. Then we added more code to get to one hundred thousand. By summer 2003, we were up to five hundred million documents."
Feedback and input from people outside of Microsoft also played a central role in the development of the new search engine. Because Microsoft had been operating a search service for five years, MSN had much information about what users search for, how they search and how satisfied they are with MSN Search. That information informed the work of the team and helped guide some significant changes to MSN Search.
The first technology preview of the new MSN Search was unveiled in July 2003. Beginning with that technology preview, the search team pursued a number of innovative avenues to solicit suggestions and feedback from search-industry experts, webmasters, and consumers.
Members of the MSN Search team also participated in a number of online forums. Online feedback, surveys and usability studies also played a key role.
MSN Search is now Bing