How does MSN Search's Search Builder function work?

You've pegged me. I'm a Google bigot at this point and rarely journey to other seach engines. But your message inspired me to check out MSN Search and find out what they've been working on. And, well, Search Builder is just phenomenally cool!

If you're used to Google's secret search language of site:, intitle: and so on, you already know that search engine queries can be quite a bit more sophisticated than just "find matches to this two word phrase". But knowing what special sequences to use, that's another story.

Kudos to the MSN Search team for solving this problem in an innovative and fun way. When you go to MSN Search, click on the "+Search Builder" link, and you'll promptly see this:

The pop-up here lets you choose between "All of these terms", "Any of these terms", "This exact phrase" and "None of these terms", which right there is a great step towards better search engine usability!

Notice the set of tabs on the left side, though: Search terms, Site/Domain, Links to, Country/Region, Language and Results ranking. Choose "Site/Domain" and here's what you see:

Quite a bit easier to work with than Google's site: notation, I must say, and what's most important is that as you specify various constraints to your search and add them, you quickly learn the shorthand notation. Want to limit your search to just .edu sites? Turns out that's expressed in the search language as site:.edu.

Hands down, though, the most interesting facet of MSN Search's Search Builder is the last tab, "Results ranking". You can just tell from this screenshot that it's going to be cool:

It turns out that with MSN Search you can tweak various search result rankings, including how recently the content has been updated, how popular the resultant pages are (based on the number of inbound links) and whether it's an exact or approximate match. To find popular and recent Web pages that exactly match "tintin, boy reporter", for example, I tweak the three sliders appropriately and find that the search is:

tintin boy reporter {popl=100} {mtch=0} {frsh=100}

This search construction tool is well worth a look and enough to get me to try out some of my favorite searches on MSN Search too now!

Tip: there's a very good MSN Search weblog worth reading, and they also talk about working with Results ranking in detail.