MSN are set to launch their brand new homepage tonight with Microsoft's corporate vice president Erik Jorgensen boldly announcing that "now is the time to clean up the mess on the Web–people need less clutter and less hassle to find what matters most to them." Of course, he'd be right, but does the new MSN offer this? This is the preview of the new design
One thing is certain, it's a big improvement on the previously cluttered homepage. And it's taken strong influences from other successful models including Facebook and Twitter feeds as well as not being a million miles away from the appearance of rivals Apple. But I'm still not entirely sure where it's improving search.
It's a great base, something I'd happily view every morning but what has it actually done to improve the search experience? Everything still goes through Bing, that's not going to change and the same old generic titles are still filling the page ('money' for example, can mean many different things).
About as close as it gets to making an innovative change is with local search which 'combines media with Bing search and provides access to real-time community news that is grouped by ZIP code.' That sounds an exciting possibility, although unless you can also group stories by subject, clutter is still likely to be an issue.
However, it'll be great to see how this affects the search engine battle, that's for sure. Watch this space.
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