You know, I give MSN Search a lot of crap. We all know it's behind Google, right? And it's even behind Yahoo too. Can we just be candid here? Yeah, we can.

But I've been following them and their blog and have noticed a marked improvement in both the engine itself as well as the content on the MSN Search blog.

First off, did you notice that if you search for Windows API calls that MSN Search now takes you to the right place on MSDN? That's a huge improvement and one I gave MSN a lot of s**t about earlier. For instance, if you search on DestroyWindow it used to take you to my blog. It now takes you to the correct page on MSDN.

That's a HUGE improvement.

Some of the recent blogs over on the MSN Search blog you might want to check out:

MSN Search Toolbar rolls out more international versions.
Windows Desktop Search APIs. Did someone say APIs? Are you sure this is MSN?
New Operators Explained. These are fun, I've been playing with a bunch tonight.

Oh, my, and are we seeing MSN beat Google for the first time at something? I was just doing some searches on Ichirio Suzuki. Look at Google's result. Look at Yahoo's results. Then look at MSN's. MSN now includes a neat little chart. Oh, I want this for myself! Searching for "Robert Scoble" doesn't have a cool chart like that.

I LIKE THIS TREND!!! If you keep this up I might not find anything bad to say about MSN anymore.

Of course, I gotta give them something else to aim for. Here's one: searching for hotels. On Google it's way better than on MSN.

For instance, I'm going to Atlanta this weekend. Search for a hotel. On MSN, for an "Atlanta Hotels" query, I get tons of intermediaries (translation: spam). On Google, for the same query I get a better top-of-page experience and I get some actual real hotels.

But, that doesn't take away the fact that I am seeing sizeable improvements on MSN's search results and integration with mapping. I spent a little bit of time with one of their developers this week and I have a feeling we'll see even more improvements soon.

How do the three engines compare for your searches?

I am drooling over this keyboard, as seen recently on Engadget. The keys have OLEDs in them which light up to show their function.

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