If you’ve read this column for awhile, you know that I don’t generally do product reviews. Reviews are tough, because they require you to actually take a stand on something. I don’t mind offering an opinion on important issues such as religion, politics, or the American League East, but if you need someone to convince you to buy either the Athlon or the Xeon, I’m not your guy.

But this week is a little different. You may have heard that on Tuesday, Microsoft released a new search engine that’s as fast as Google, as lean as Google, and is looking to topple Google from its search engine throne. No stranger to this battle, MSN Search has been the number two engine for a while now. But, truth be told, that’s sort of like being the second best basketball player to Michael Jordan. There’s Google, and then there’s everyone else.

About a month ago, I started using the beta version of MSN Search. It was pretty good, so I told a few people about it. Some liked it, some didn’t, but everyone agreed that Microsoft made a good move by deliberately emulating Google’s sparse, no frills, easy-to-understand interface. After all, it’s hard for a user to make a mistake when there’s only one text box on the whole screen. But it’s not just the look that’s changed. After years of relying on Yahoo’s databases and algorithms, MSN Search has built its own underlying engine, and the result is a much improved search experience.

I decided to run Google (http://www.google.com) and MSN Search (http://search.msn.com) side-by-side to compare the experiences. I rated them on three criteria: relevance; hit count; and extra features.

For relevance, I queried my own name, Ken Circeo. (Enter punch line here.) A few years ago, I’d search for my name on Yahoo or Alta Vista and I’d get about ten hits, mostly because of a series of impossibly dull networking articles I wrote back in the mid-1990s that someone had the poor sense to publish. But because PCmech archives everything, the same search today returns about 185 hits on Google and almost as many on MSN. When it comes to rifling through the hits, whether it’s 185 or 185,000, I’m only looking at the first two pages – three if I’m feeling adventuresome. To that end, I wondered which engine offered the most recently published articles. Of the ten articles on the MSN front page, only four were published within the last year. Not too relevant. Google, on the other hand, showed eight new articles. Eight compared to four. Big plus for Google.

The hit count test was easy. Among search engines, Google has the largest database of web pages with more than 8 billion. If fact, they’re so proud of it that they announce it right on their search page: “Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages.” MSN has a mere 5 billion. For this test, I decided to search for a famous person, the anti-Ken Circeo, so to speak.

Barbra Streisand spells her first name with only two A’s instead of the normal three. I don’t know why. Maybe her parents spelled it that way on purpose. Maybe she just wanted to be different. I don’t know. But a search for “Barbra Streisand” returns over 900,000 hits on Google and just 400,000 on MSN. By comparison, “Dwight D. Eisenhower” yields only 379,000 and 215,000 respectively. That’s disturbing, considering that Ike meant a lot more to this country than Barbra Streisand ever did. Even more troubling, however, is that a search for “Barbara Streisand” – misspelled with an extra A – returns 96,000 hits! And 25 of those are for the Barbara Streisand Fan Club! That means that 25 people operating fan clubs for Barbra Streisand DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO SPELL THE WOMAN’S NAME!

Still, Google won this heat hands down. Even though you’ll never look through those 900,000 pages, the higher number of hits, the more confidence you’ll naturally place in the search engine, and the more likely you are to use it. And for Google and MSN, that’s the ultimate goal.

Google had won the first two rounds and things were looking bleak for the snazzy new MSN Search. But I still needed to compare the engines’ extra features. I knew that Google had recently ventured into other areas like retail (Froogle), email (Gmail), and news – all while maintaining the glorious simplicity of its home page. (It’s amazing what you can do with a “More” link.) Of course, Microsoft offers all that under its MSN umbrella, but I’d read in a press release that MSN Search will also answer questions based on information it culls from Encarta. Sort of like Ask Jeeves.

So I typed in “Who was Johnny Carson?” and, sure enough, MSN Search gave the answer at the top of the hits page. Pretty spiffy. By the same token, “Who was Ed McMahon?” returned a list of hits with no answer at the top. (But then, that’s only fitting, right?)

The press release also said that MSN will search your PC as well as the web. If that’s true, I hope it’s better than the impossibly slow Search feature that comes with Windows. Half the time, I press the “Stop” button before it’s over just because I don’t have time to wait on the rest of the results. The cartoon dog doesn’t help.
The new MSN desktop search feature is still in beta. But I was anxious, so I downloaded the toolbar to my PC and ran a few searches to compare it to the laborious Windows Search. Night and day. MSN Search does a full-text search of all documents on my PC, and the results are immediate. It’s fantastic. I can’t even express what a difference this is going to make in my daily work experience. See, I’m used to either searching manually through My Documents or grudgingly using the cartoon dog thing. Forgive my giddiness, but this new toolbar is worth getting excited over.

So what’s the bottom line? MSN or Google? I still don’t know. To me, the single most important aspect of a search engine is the relevance of its hits. I don’t really care if a search only returns three hits, as long as all three are exactly what I’m looking for. After the “Ken Circeo” search, I ran a few others, and, while MSN gave a respectable showing, I have to give the nod to Google. The hit count goes to Google as well.
So that leaves the special features award, which clearly goes to MSN. If both Google and MSN continue the trend of adding new features and integrating services, MSN will have an inherent advantage because Microsoft owns the Windows desktop. (Hence, the desktop search feature.) Look at it this way. At its core, Google is a search engine that’s trying to expand into a portal by adding e-mail, e-commerce, etc. MSN is a portal that’s trying to gain users by adding a really powerful search engine.

Who will end up on top? Well, Google already has the coveted mindshare, while Microsoft has the money and tenacity to stay in the fight for the long haul. For you, it’ll come down to how you perform your daily computing tasks. If you’re accustomed to using Google and it meets your needs, you’ll probably keep using it. On the other hand, if you decide you can’t live without the MSN desktop search feature and find yourself using the integrated web search as well, you’ll probably end up switching to MSN.

Both engines are so powerful and both interfaces are so simple, I feel like I could use either one with confidence and no proverbial question marks hovering over my head.

Except one.

Just between you and me…to this day, after thousands of Google searches, I still have no idea what the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is for. And, to be honest, I’m kind of afraid to click it. If you ever do, and live to tell about it, let me know what happens.