Yesterday evening, Brady Forrest from Microsoft Search informed me and the other Search Champs via email that the new MSN Search engine is now capable of searching in full within RSS and Atom feeds.

Here is the communication he sent out:

"We pushed out two new operators last week.:

• Feed: will return any RSS or ATOM documents that contain your query terms
• Hasfeed: will return any site that links to an RSS or ATOM feed and returns for your query term.

You can now search for feeds without doing a complex series of OR's with the terms RSS, ATOM, and XML."

Here some examples he provided and my suprising test results:

Example Searches:

All of Robin Good RSS feeds
http://search.msn.com.br/results.aspx?...

"How many RSS feeds the BBC has?"
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx...

"BBC news division"
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx...

"What pages on the NY Times site have feeds?"
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx...

N.B.: If you are testing this from outside the US, go first to the Configuration link on the http://search.msn.com home page and set the engine to work in English, otherwise none of the above will work.

Here from the middle of the Atlantic (Azores - Portugal), and unlike waht happens on Google, even when I start my search from the US MSN Search page, I am defaulted back to the Brazilian results in Portuguese, and none of the example URLs provided by the Microsoft team work from here unless I change and save the configuration.