"what's the verdict?"

Every person who worked on this project should be fired ;)

Honestly, they haven't gotten anything right. I have 90 pages in their index compared to 140,000 in Yahoo and I don't think I'm alone in this. I have all static URL's so that's not the problem, the bot just doesn't crawl. The serps are ridiculously bad. They're so embarrassing msndude won't even show up anymore...lol. I could go on and on....

It still suffers from the same problems it had on day one. I get very little traffic from them because they still can't manage to find the appropriate pages in my site to return. (At least they do return pages from my site - just the wrong ones.)

Whatever they did in december (?) was totally ass backwords!
Not sure yet what they are trying to do since it doesn't make any sense at all but if they are trying to compete with other SE's then they are on the wrong path, a path that leads to a total destruction of their search engine.
It seems like they said "Let's look at what all other search engines are doing and then we'll do the opposite. If a site has 10,000 pages in Google, then let's just show one. If a site is popular in all other SE's then we don't want to show it....."
Just doesn't make any sense whatsoever so I guess the answer to your question is: Not no, but hell no! They haven't got it right! What they should do is to syndicate Googles, Yahoo's and Ask's result and skip trying to compete because they can't.

We get almost no traffic from MSN. We used to get some traffic from them, but it's dropped away to nearly nothing. My suspicion is that this is mostly MSN's fault, but I haven't made the effort to figure out what's really going on.

>>but I haven't made the effort to figure out what's really going on.

To me it's quite sad to think that we might never figure out what MSN doesn't like about our sites. I'm assuming that they can indentify my site as being a .com, hosted in the US with a US audience. So even if I think it's wrong to do so, I've got some kind of penalty being applied just in the US results.

It's also more than just the loss of traffic from MSN it's also a matter of pride. We're in the midst of publishing a series of articles that no one else comes close to explaining. How to do it, what to look for, real life examples... I guarantee we will be in the top 10 in Yahoo and Google in a very short timeframe - I have absolutely zero hope in MSN.

We have .edu and teaching sites referencing more and more of our materials and that help restore some of that pride.

We have always ranked very well in msn. Most of our keywords are in the top 10. We get very little traffic from them though. Honestly, most users do not really use msn search or live.

May be windows vista will change this now with microsofts operating system. But who knows...

If MSN could figure out how to crawl a site thoroughly and deal with 301 redirects, their SE quality would instantly jump by half IMO.

Ask's result

It occurred to me this morning that MS would probably do well either licensing Ask's stuff or outright buying them. IMHO, Ask's SE is far superior to Live. MSN's marketing machine just needs a half-decent product to pitch, and Live ain't it.

We never had any traffic from live search so that it felt better to block their bots due to vast bandwidth consumption caused by our videos which they had started despite robots.txt

Last nite all of a sudden MSN started to send MORE traffic than Google to one very old page that was hidden deep within the site.

In fact that page had contained the search phrase only one time and it was not even listed within the meta tags.

On the live search our page is listed on No.1 and to be honest, the content that we have for that keyword is much less worth than for loads of other keywords for which we are on Google's No 1 pages.

It is very hard to see any logic in this.

>>It is very hard to see any logic in this.

Like it or now, that is their spam logic. And that is the very reason MSN is going nowhere fast.