MSN is now hiring people to hand craft SERP in real time.

On the MSN jobs openings page I found something quite unusual for the Search engine industry. Before I say anything about this why don’t you have a look at the snippet from the original listings:

Hand crafted results
When all else fails, and the ranking algorithms do not pass the confidence threshold, we fall back to delivering handcrafted results. Working on a team of approximately 132 other handcrafters in 26 worldwide markets, you will receive a user query, use all the available search engines to quickly scour the web for results, pick the top 10 results for this query, and send it on to the user. Successful handcrafters can typically find top 10 results for a real-time user’s query in less than 3.8 seconds. This is an opportunity to truly connect with customers, because the queries that get routed to you are precisely the ones that the engine cannot answer well. We will have adequate staffing to allow generous coffee and bathroom breaks.
If you are an expert at using at least 3 different search engines, well versed with American English/colloquial usage, and can type at > 149 words/minute as measured by the Simia-Lico method – come join us and delight users real-time!

🙂 So now MSN wants to serve us better by employing special handcrafter to send the results in real time to the user. I guess with millions of hits a day it would be quite tough job for the MSN to server people better this way.

One thing that made me smile was job responsibility to “use all the available search engines to quickly scour the web for results” , So Now MSN knows who is the Boss and would like to steal the results form their competitors and quickly and manually serve the top results to their user. 🙂

I knew that MSN is desperate to win the great search engine war, But didn’t know that they can do the painful task to hand pick results from other search engine result pages to manually build their own results in real time.

1 Comment

  1. Misunderstood rage

    One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is ‘to be prepared’ — George W Bush

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