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Microsoft's Eytan Seidman, a product manager for MSN Search, came out swinging at Google during the Search Engine Smackdown.'

Can MSN Search exceed Google? Will relevance truly become associated with MSN Search? Query your thoughts and post them on WebProWorld.

WebProNews publisher Rich Ord emailed some notes from the PubCon session featuring reps from the search teams at Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Ask Jeeves. The MSN guy was in combative mode for his part of the talk, a mode that seemed to take the room by surprise.

Said Rich: However, the MSN guy was very aggressive about comparing their search results to Google's and claiming that MSN Search results are at least "just as good" ... (the audience laughed quite a bit at his pointed remarks about Google)

... very much in the "Smackdown" mode in his talk ... The other speakers were not in that mode ... so the contrast was noticeable to everyone ... Microsoft clearly has there eyes set on Google with MSN Search. He even put up a side by side comparison of Google results and MSN Search results for the same query

In July 2004, MSN made its first search preview available. Seidman called it "quite possibly the world's worst search engine." He probably wouldn't have been the first to say it, as several thousand users likely beat him to the punch.

Since then, MSN Search has progressed through beta and a couple of release versions before becoming what it is today. To Seidman, today MSN Search is an engine that is at least as relevant as Google.

He provided an example of searching for a hotel by address. MSN gave one result, while Google gave lots of results. MSN is focused on giving a quality result rather than giving a slew of results where the majority isn't relevant to the query.

Seidman reviewed a list of changes to MSN Search, along with the relevance improvements they have made:

Additional answers for the Instant Answer feature;
Making the MSN Search API and Virtual Earth available;
MSN AdCenter development;
Simple feed search with feed: and hasfeed: operators;
and the recent release of Enterprise Desktop Search.

Webmasters will be interested in noting how MSN Search treats 301 and 302 redirects. With permanent 301 redirects, the destination URL becomes the canonical URL. In temporary 302 redirects, the source URL gets treated as the canonical URL.

Seidman also noted ways in which users might want to take advantage of the MSN Search API, if they haven't already. The API now allows more queries per day and more results per query. Use in applications like tracking keywords for SEO purposes or integrating MSN into a site for site search were listed as examples.

To reemphasize the quality over quantity aims of Microsoft's search efforts, Seidman displayed a slide - "MSN: More Isn't Always Better."

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.