The new MSN search engine that launched this week is clearly labeled “beta,” so all the rushes to judgment are a bit early. But at least the team behind the engine is communicating quickly and candidly with users and webmasters, and they’re using a blog to do it. According to a ClickZ news item quoting product manager Justin Osmer, the team “wanted to open more lines of communication with our users and thought that this Weblog would be a good way for us to do that.”

There are three messages on the blog: an introductory note, an announcement of the search engine’s launch, and an apology: “In the process of making our new MSN Search beta broadly available we experienced some technical difficulties that caused the beta service to function improperly or be unavailable for some users for periods of time. We’re working through these issues one by one and you should see service availability and quality improve soon if not already.  We apologize for any inconvenience.”

There are 31 comments to the post, none of which are the kind of anti-Microsoft screeds one might expect.