New Look of MSN Search

It's difficult to miss announcements about Microsoft's beta launch of their own search engine. The latest update looks better than its technology preview counterpart. I'm very intrigued by the MSN Search beta and its bells and whistles.

The Search Builder | Results ranking feature looks particularly interesting. I'm curious to see how it will be accepted by people, but I think it a great move.

Here comes the shocker: the search page has the XHTML 1.0 Strict DOCTYPE (!) and it almost validates, save missing alt attributes (Molly will kill you if you say alt-tag!) and a couple of redundant class attributes. Also, it appears they don't serve the style sheet with a content-type header which gives the CSS validator grief. Other than that the code looks kosher compared to what we've seen Microsoft write so far.

The body element is assigned a class (which I myself have been advocating too) that lets them adjust the default font setting depending on the language.

SEO gurus will start speculating how many pages MSN has indexed, etc, while I'm glad to see more commitment to the web standards. This is great news and I hope others at Microsoft will take heed.