Neowin.net

Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division on Thursday will launch a public beta of its Web search technology, according to sources familiar with the plans. The beta will expand on MSN's technology preview of its new search engine that has been available through the MSN Sandbox site. MSN launched a second preview last month with a Web index of about 5 billion documents after conducting a smaller two-month test earlier in the summer.

Sources said that the beta will add "more bells and whistles" to MSN's previous previews and will be more widely available. The launch this week will not involve MSN's desktop search, which is slated for release in December, the sources said. MSN plans to run its search-engine beta site concurrently with its existing MSN Search site until the technology is ready for a full launch, sources said. MSN Search draws its results from Yahoo Inc.'s Web index and search engine technology.

View: MSN Search Beta
News source: eWeek

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Ben Goodger has updated his Blog with some interesting stuff concerning the 1.0 release. Read the whole entry here.

This day has come a lot later than any of us originally planned, but that's the way software goes. I've learned a lot about a huge number of things in the process, have had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different people about their experiences with the software, etc. It's been a long road but we're finally here. No software is perfect, we did not fix every bug, implement every feature, but what we did do was create what we believe to be the best browser around. I want to thank you all again for the support over the past few years.

We also asked Ben what the progress was after 1.0 :

"After 1.0 we plan to resync our development work with the Mozilla trunk so that we can immediately pick up the great work that's been going on with Gecko since we've been away, continue our HIG compliance efforts for MacOS X, improve existing systems and plan for the next major release. The first interim release will be 1.1 in or around March 2005. ".