Bing (search engine) web crawler. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own self-built search engine results, the index of which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004, and came out of beta in February 2005. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an
Microsoft Search Server to extract the text of the file for full text indexing as well. The handlers and iFilters MSS uses are the same as used by SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Search as well. The data sources that are to be indexed are identified by their URIs and have to be configured prior to indexing. The indexer updates the search index as soon as an item is indexed ("continuous propagation") so that the items can be queried against even before the indexing crawl is complete. MSS can also federate searches to other search services (including SharePoint and web search servers)