• by Shankar Gupta , August 3, 2005

InfoSpace's meta-search engine, Dogpile, added MSN to the roster of search engines it taps for results.

InfoSpace now is the first company to syndicate MSN's search results since the feeds were made available in June. InfoSpace previously provided online addresses and phone listings for MSN, but that arrangement ended in April when MSN tapped WhitePages.com for directory listings.

Dogpile gleans its search listings--both paid and natural--from search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, and, now, MSN. The sponsored pay-per-click links are blended into the natural searches, and marked with a "sponsored by" tag.

To tout the launch of MSN results in the meta-search engine, Dogpile Tuesday also released the second part of a study conducted in collaboration with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University. For the study, "Different Engines, Different Results," researchers entered more than 12,000 queries on Google, Yahoo! Ask Jeeves, and MSN, and found an overlap of just 1.1 percent of the front-page results.

The first part of the study, released in May, compared front-page results from only Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves. That portion of the study found a 3 percent overlap between the front-page results of those three engines.