MSN search showing site previews

[MakeMeTop]

I've not seen this before, but if you use the search button on IE, a list of sites comes up at the side (as before) - but then a full picture of the top 6 sites home pages appears on the main screen. Joe Public is going to love this! You can instantly spot spammy pages and ones that look good.

I think this could be a Google beater :)

Bad news is that it means even more to be in the top 6 sites!

[ihelpyou]

hey MMT, I'm not seeing this. Could you explain to the mentally impaired? :)

[MakeMeTop]

It sort of caught me by surprise Doug. I was checking some referrals and came up with a URL which brought up an MSN page called search.msn.com/preview.asp - which showed snapshots of the to 6 sites.

Nothing I seemed to do could replicate this until I switched my default search to MSN US. Then I searched for a few sites (even yours) and hey presto, list of site titles came up as previously in a left hand window - then after about 30 seconds up came a dynamically generated page with pictures of the top 6 sites with title and description - on a page with the preview.asp URL.

Try this referral URL and see if it works for you :)

http://search.msn.com/results.asp?q=uk+search+engine+optimisation&origq=&RS=CHECKED&FORM=IE4&v=1&cfg=SMCSP&nosp=0&thr=&x=29&y=4

[ihelpyou]

No. I've been trying to find this and I cannot see it. :(

[MakeMeTop]

This information (http://help.msn.com/EN_US/frameset.asp?Topic=ORG_preview_faq.htm&INI=searchv3.ini&H_APP=MSN%20Search&BrandID=&Filter=&H_VER=1.5&NoMax=0&v1=http%3A//search.msn.com&v2=&sp=1) talks about it. It is the help panel I found coming off the page. It may take a while to load.

I searched for search engine optimisation and see that Kal now has her picture on the front page of her site. The thumbnails that come up are pretty good!

It is a pretty good cloaking buster too (says Barry having a play) :)

[ihelpyou]

No go MMT. I did see this:

Why don't I see the check box that enables Search Preview?
There are several reasons that this check box may not appear:

This is a preliminary version of this feature and not all users have access to it.
Search Preview is only available for MSN Search results from the Search Assistant pane in Internet Explorer 5.0 or later. Click Customize in the Search Assistant pane to verify that MSN Search is providing your results.
Search Preview may have been temporarily disabled by MSN Search for administrative reasons.
I have IE 5.5 and cannot see the checkbox for the preview pane.

[Mel]

Hi Doug:


according to the help provided for this new feature"

You have to be doing your searches through the search pane on IE not the regular search window.

This is new and not all users have access to it.

[bigDugan]

I believe this may be controlled on the backend through the search panel's javascript (http://search.msn.com/main/css/searchpane.js) and uses the search.msn.com cookie by setting the srchpreview=1 parameter in your cookie. (so you have to have cookies enabled for this site) No srchpreview parameter, no previews.

How do I prevent my Web site from appearing in Search Preview? (http://help.msn.com/!data/en_us/data/searchv3.its51/$content$/faq_prevent_preview.htm)

[JuniorHarris]

Very interesting!~

It looks like the preview images are being pulled from msnsearch.srv.girafa.com, does this imply a separate spider to capture the images?