MSN Search is the search engine for the MSN portal site. It has a large unique database, query building 'search builder' and Boolean searching. It has cached copies of Web pages including date cached, and automatic local search options.

     Weakness: The main weaknesses of MSN search are its inconsistent availability of truncation and no title, truncation and stemming. Moreover, multiple search terms are processed as an AND operation by default. MSN Search offers full Boolean searching, although the AND is not needed since it is the default operation. MSN Search supports Boolean operators AND (or the ampersand symbol &), OR (or the pipe symbol |), and NOT. Either AND NOT or NOT can be used. Operators must be in upper case unless symbols are used. Searching can be nested using parentheses. MSN Search can also use - for NOT, but there must be no space between the - and the query term (Notess, 2005). The plus symbol + seems to make no difference unless used in front of a stop word. The Search Builder includes options for has a drop down menu choice for All of these Term, Any of these Terms, and None of these Terms. Phrase searching can be designated by double quotes "" around a search phrase. There is also an "exact phrase" option in the Search Builder under Search Terms. This search engine Invokes the language limit when followed by the two letter language code. It also specifies a country or region using two character country or region codes. The Search Builder makes use of a number of limit options.

Searches can be limited by location/domain or can exclude a specific domain. MSN can limit by country and/or region. It can limit results specific file types: HTML, PDF, PowerPoint, Word, or Excel. Default includes all these file types. There are 12 language limits as of March 2005: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. There is a Safe Search limit for excluding sexually explicit content. By default, it is automatically set to exclude sexually explicit images but not text. MSN will search single stop words like 'the' or 'an', and it will search them within a "phrase search." However, it will ignore stop words if there are other non-stop-word terms unless a + is put in front of the stop word. Results are sorted by relevance. The display of results includes the title, a brief keyword-in-context (KWIC) display, the URL, and a link to the cached copy of the page. A date is sometimes displayed to the right of the cache link when that page has been updated in the MSN database recently. MSN Search displays 10 records at a time, by default. MSN Search automatically tries to identify a user's location for the local search. The location can also be changed by the user through the "settings" link. Then, clicking the "Near Me" button next to the "Search" button runs a local search based on the default location.

The new MSN Search makes it easier and faster to find just what the user wants (Nelson, 2006). With results from MSN Music, MSN Encarta® and even the user's own desktop, MSN Search gives the user all the tools he needs to make the most of his time. The MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search is a collection of toolbars designed to help the user more efficiently search the Web and the computer from within Microsoft Internet Explorer or Windows Explorer, the Windows taskbar, and Microsoft Outlook. The suite also features an automatic form fill manager, a pop-up Blocker for preventing pop-up ads from appearing, and a highlight feature that highlights search results for you. These make it special. MSN's core weakness is it has no audience. It's a catch 22 for MSN, it needs the audience to win the advertisers to drive its system forwards. There is no known truncation, stemming, or wild card word in a phrase capabilities exist. MSN Search has no case sensitive searching. MSN Search has several field searching capabilities, but it does not have a title search, one of the most common options elsewhere. These are its weaknesses. There are two interesting things to note about MSN search engine. If there is a keyword rich paragraph near the top of the page, either in the first or second paragraph, then the page “may” do well in search requests for the keywords in that paragraph. MSN search leads to pages that have links to other sites with those keywords in the clickable text (Nelson, 2006). Some search tips in using MSN search are: Words can be prefixed with = to turn them into commands, which are then stored in history for one-click recall. The users should Web Type one or more search terms, and then click Search. The most relevant content is frequently location specific. When the user is looking for local events, places, and services on the Web, he must type the location as part of his search term, and then click the Local text link to start the search. MSN Search can be used to search for information in over 35 different languages.. One must avail of the Search Worldwide page to learn more about country/region and language search options. Search Builder option must be used to create complex searches by combining or excluding terms, by selecting domains, countries, or regions, or by selecting the language to perform your search. The user can Desktop Type the search terms into the search box, and then click Desktop to find documents in one's own computer as well as e-mail in Microsoft Office Outlook.