A few days before Christmas, Microsoft’s MSN Search team announced their MSN Search Wiki. The word quickly spread to blogs like ResearchBuzz and Google Blogoscoped. Of the major search engines, MSN Search is the only one to employ wikis as a way to encourage customer participation in the product development process. Hats off to Microsoft for showing such leadership!

A wiki, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is essentially an interactive website that any visitor can edit, with a view to improving or enhancing it. In other words, a “website run by the community.” It’s not uncommon for entire websites to be built by web visitors. A great example is the Wikipedia, an entire encyclopedia written by and maintained by its online visitors.

I’ve just made some contributions to MSN Search’s wiki, including:

• A feature comparison chart between MSN Search, Google, and Yahoo!
• Several recommendations for feature enhancements

Come on everyone, join in and help Microsoft make a killer search engine!