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
Search engine (computing) Search engine (computing) A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called "hits". Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information which must be consulted, akin to other techniques for managing information overload. The most public, visible form of a search engine is a Web search engine which searches for information on the World Wide Web. Search engines provide an interface to a group of items that enables users to