Version 1.0 of Microsoft's new MSN Search is up. No thumbs up, more like a hand palm down, waggling a bit. (This is the closest I could come to that, from Gerhard Schaber's thesis on computer hand gesture recognition.)

MSN Search is not bad, for a Google clone. That's cruel and wrong. It's not a clone, because there is just a ton of stuff missing. Newsgroups are missing, shopping is missing, a directory is missing (although Google itself now hides that behind a "more" button.) Yes, Yahoo is better.

What you get are Web, images, and news. The main news page (previously seen at their MSNBC site) only lists one story, then adds the word "similar" which leads to a limited search of official and licensed media. They're using Moreover to get behind some registration firewalls.

But let's talk about the search itself.

I tried a few quick ones. As to my own name MSN came up mostly trumps, although why this is the first entry on the second page is beyond me -- I wrote about it once. But there is a "near me" button that turned up some of my work for other sites.

And as to total results it's not close. Google has me 85,400 times, using Dana-Blankenhorn. MSN has me about 13,000 times. (Yahoo is in the middle, with about 62,000 references to me. And remember, since my first name is Polish and my last name German I'm the only Blankenhorn I have ever found with the first name of Dana.)

I also suspect MSN Search doesn't obey the - sign in the way Google does, making sure results have both terms next to each other in results. In a search on Sheffield-Wednesday, I got a number of stories on things that happened on Wednesday, and not just in Sheffield, England either. (Oh, and a search of MSN Search for the image "MSN Search" should turn up a proper logo. Google had to find this image in Poland.)

The only feature that is really new here is the Encarta search, featured on the main box. It's a nice feature. But the standard Firefox search box has Dictionary.Com, Amazon.Com, eBay.Com, and lets you add other sites as well (although not MSN yet). Hard to call that a killer.

What's in this for Microsoft? After spending untold millions of dollars, they've got something that advertises their other stuff, and that looks like a Google copy. That used to be good enough for Microsoft, which used its marketing muscle and alliances to toss rivals aside in the past.

Whether it will be this time or not remains to be seen. But I'm doubtful.