Search Engines and Algorithms: Optimizing for MSN’s RankNet Technology

[mandy]

The latest major change in the search engine giant, MSN Search, has been the inoculation of “neural networks” into its search engine algorithm, something internal researchers call “RankNet.” This change took place in late June of this year. This algorithm is fresh, and it is becoming a great consideration for many search optimizers.

MSN RankNet: What Is It?

RankNet is, in essence, a “learning machine” that takes the patterns of human searches into account, and learns from them, in order to provide more relevant results the next time around. They start from a baseline of predictions made that are input into its neural net...

...the way MSN ranks a website can be listed into a few basic concepts. MSN relies heavily upon anchor text in links and content is still King. Because of this, the MSN algorithm relies upon high keyword density as well, even more so than Yahoo. The presence of a robots.txt file lately has been seen to be highly important to the MSN robot’s crawls, and MSN has been known to completely disregard sites that don’t incorporate the robots.txt.....

full article: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/MSN-Optimizat...echnology/