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April 26 Search is a Love ProblemI first had the idea for this post a few years ago, when Google’s April Fool’s Day prank was to define love as a search problem and talked about how Google Romance was going to find you the person of your dreams. We wish! (Although, at one time it DID work for Rory). But anyway, it got me thinking about Search and Community, and now that I’ve been on the Live Search team for a year I have more I can say. So in their April Fool’s Day prank, Google had it precisely inverted. Love is not a search problem as much as search is actually a love problem, and all the search boxes in the world will have to take that fact into account. Now I’m not going to talk about how computer geeks love computer algorithms, or how math geeks love the math of search, or how crawlers love the web pages they crawl (which sounds too kinky for this blog). I’m going to talk about how you find things around the house, what your friends do when they give you stuff, versus what happens when you are with strangers. a) You wander around the kitchen groggily looking for the coffee grounds, which you know were in the cupboard only yesterday. Your housemate says: I put them by the sink cupboard behind the coffeepot. (Very Local Search) b) You are on the phone with your mom and she says: you know those pants you loved when we were out shopping last weekend? They just went on sale this afternoon so I picked you up a pair. (Shopping/Product Search) c) You realize your coworker left a notebook full of info on your desk on next steps for your project. You bring it back to them. (Sharing – think Digg.com but also, Stumbleupon.com) Can you imagine if your experiences were different? As in, no love? a) Your ex-housemate now hates you, moves out. Suddenly, there’s all sorts of porn magazines delivered to your mailbox at home. You have to wade through the piles of nudes to find your copy of Wired. (PORN SPAM GONE WILD) b) You want coffee and your too-cheery housemate says: Buy NEW MAXWELL HOUSE STARBUCKS CRUNCHYBROWN BEANS! WITH EXTRA CAFFEINE! But does not lead you to the coffee. What kind of friend IS this? Certainly, no friend of Betsy’s. (ADS GONE WILD) c) Your mom mails you a sweater she thinks is perfect but actually looks better on her than you. (Now, this can actually happen and it is not a sign of anyone hating you, just mom’s taste in clothes and yours = totally different.) But then, not to offend her, you wear the sweater at the next family function and more relatives buy you similar ones for Christmas, thinking that you liked it. :P (BAD SEARCH HISTORY GONE WILD) Because at the end of the day, it’s not what the search engine thinks is the most relevant answer. It’s what a human brain thinks is the most relevant answer. Humans make the queries, and humans make the answers. In the end, the user experience is what matters. And humans determine the user experience. That’s why community features and approaches are so important. A search engine isn’t going to collate information from several web sites into a “how-to” because it’s never made bath fizzies/bombs before. A search engine hasn’t lived through the experience of where to put aging parents who can still get around but might fall down with no one to help. And even if the math is perfect, only so many answers fit on that first page, and there are many more types of people in the world who may disagree with the results. Search is a love problem. -- Betsy Aoki, Program Manager, Live Search
April 24 Live Product Search: More Images, More RelevantThe team just released changes to Live Product Search that boost customer-perceived relevance by increasing the number of query results with images. The table below summarizes the improvement. Why aren’t there 100% images in the top results? The reason is largely because many sites, including very reputable merchants like Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, and AceHardwareSuperStore.com, block image crawling bots or seriously throttle them. We will have to work with these sites to address these issues, but the latest improvements in the number of Product Search top results with images are already quite significant.
Below you will find a before and after comparison for "zune player." Note that not all results are as relevant- and image-packed as highlighted in "After" but this is a good example of our improvement. Before After Find out more on the Live Product Search team blog post! -- Ling Bao, Live Search
April 11 Discovering SitemapsWhen we first teamed up with Google and Yahoo to support sitemaps as an industry standard, it was with the express intention of driving the protocol forward. Making it into a simple, effective way to tell all search engines about the structure of your site.
Today, I'm happy to announce the latest addition to the protocol: Sitemap Autodiscovery. Autodiscovery gives siteowners the ability to easily share their sitemaps with all search engines at once, without the overhead of manually submitting them to each one. In order to share your sitemap with the crawlers at large, you simply provide the following line in your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: <sitemap_location>
Where <sitemap_location> is the complete URL of your Sitemap Index File (or your sitemap file, if you don't have an index file). This directive is independent of the user-agent. so as long as it is present in the robots.txt file, all engines will be able to find your sitemaps. I see this as an important extension to the protocol, as it removes the need to individually submit sitemaps to each engine - simply add one line to your robots.txt file, and we will find your new and updated sitemaps automatically.
Although we aren't ready to start consuming sitemaps quite yet, I encourage you to build a sitemap and add the "sitemap" directive to your robots.txt. As soon as we roll out support (before the end of the year), we will be able to start crawling your sitemap files immediately. If you want more detail on the sitemaps protocol, including autodiscovery, check out www.sitemaps.org.
As always, we are eager to hear your feedback and suggestions. Please send them our way using this link.
--Brent Hands, Program Manager, Live Search
April 04 Live Search Maps Update - 3D maps for Firefox, RSS collections, reviews and more!Hi all, This is no April Fool’s joke ;) ; the Live Search team has just released a dozen new enhancements for its Live Search Maps service available at maps.live.com! Firefox users now have their own plug-in to use 3-D! Customers complained; we listened. Zooming around the virtual landscape is not just for Internet Explorer Users any more; users of Firefox 1.5 or later can click on the 3D button at http://maps.live.com and will be prompted to download and install the plug-in. Get updates to your favorite collections via RSS! Say you’ve got one friend who is the designated “foodie” of your gang, who keeps you up to date on the latest places to eat around the city. Before, you had to go to back the specific link that friend sent you, to get information about their updates. Now you can just subscribe via RSS and be notified on your desktop of the latest places to chow. And with new cities being added to the Live Maps site, you have even more locations to choose from! See new ratings and reviews for businesses! On detail pages for each business, you can now browse or input your own ratings and reviews for that business. Some businesses may have additional reviews from Judysbook.com and citysearch.com. Sign in to your Windows Live ID and contribute your own review of any business by clicking the ‘Write Review’ button. Find out more on the Live Search Maps team blog post! --Betsy Aoki, Program Manager, Live Search April 03 We are flattered, but...Betsynote: This is a reprint of Eytan's post of March 28 on the blogs.msdn.com/livesearch blog. He forgot to cross-post. :)
For those of you who use some of the advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:, you may have noticed that this functionality has been recently turned off. We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators.
We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries. We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve. Our apologies and thank you for being patient. Keep an eye on our blog for updates. Eytan Seidman Lead Program Manager, Live Search |
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