MSN Search Has a Brand New Ranker

MSN introduced RankNet, a new tecnology to rank search results. The algorithm is described in “Learning to Rank using Gradient Descent“. For details, please read MSN Search and Learning to Rank by Greg Linden.

Also, new MSN Search commands are being offered:
FileType – restricts documents to a particular filetype.
InAnchor:, InURL:, InTitle:, and InBody – let you find keywords in a particular part of the document.
Link: keyword – finds documents that link to a particular page.
LinkDomain: - finds documents that point to any page in a domain.
Contains: – returns documents that contain hyperlinks to documents with a particular file extension.