MSN was founded in 1995 by Microsoft. The website was back then planned as pure Internet Service Provider, which should guarantee the user an easy way in the internet. The service was outside the just moderately successful, because it was adapted on American structures.

MSN got very successful, when Microsoft won the browserfight against Netscape and integrated the Internet Explorer in their operation system.

Millions of internet users suddenly had MSN as welcome page, which increased the name recognition explosively. Microsoft had already rebuilt the website to a portal, which provided different services as for instance Email, Search and News. The success shot down quickly. Eventhough desktop-monopoly and nearly unlimited funds from Microsoft, MSN is still today not as Successful as Aamzon or Google.

The on the website integrated search-function was not really an independent search-engine. MSN baught search results from other companies. Not until the last years MSN became a real search engine that has about 5 billion websites in its index.

So MSN developed from an ISP to a portal and search-engine is one of most popular and most used internet portales worldwide next to Yahoo and AOL. Today MSN offers many services, one of them Hotmail, on of the worldwide most succesfull Email-services. MSN is by now wide located and available in 41 countries and 27 languages. Also interesting, in contrast to other contries, the german search service censored. As for instance erotic contents are not shown.