The Live Local team shipped a major update this week with a bunch of new unique features. Coverage in blogs and other online sites has been really positive, but they all seem to focus on the same couple of features. We wanted to spotlight some of the other goodies that are often overlooked, while also providing tips for the big ticket features that might not be obvious.

International Coverage

Until now, International support in Live Local has been thin, focusing on North America. Not any more! With this release we introduced maps all over the world, street address lookups in nearly 30 Countries and driving directions in places you’ve probably never heard of. You can just as easily get Directions form your Hotel to a club in Amsterdam as you can from the same hotel to one in Budapest.  Also new in this release, we have begun rolling out super high-res aerial and birds eye imagery that you won’t find anywhere else online. The UK is the first area covered, but as promised we’ll just keep rolling out the imagery over the coming weeks. The Google Earth Blog has a good look at this feature and how it stacks up to competing offerings.

Live Messenger Integration

Probably one of the most useful features we’ve ever popped out. This lets you and a friend on your Messenger contact list navigate a single shared map! If you’ve ever tried to help a friend pick a hotel in a new city via phone or try to agree on a place to meet to throw a Frisbee, this is your feature. You initiate the Messenger conversation from within Live Local – Use the ‘Share -> Share in Messenger’ menu (just above the map) to display your Messenger Contact list. Choose a contact and they will be alerted to accept your invite. When they do, a conversation window will open with your map loaded from Live Local. When you drag the map, it updates on their display as well. If your friend does a search for Thai Restaurants, you both see the results. If you right click on the map to add a custom pushpin, it is displayed for both of you. Give it a try! Works in MSN Messenger 6.0 or higher including Live Messenger.

Microsoft Outlook Integration

Coinciding with the launch this week, a free Windows Live Local plugin for Microsoft Outlook hit the streets that integrates maps and driving directions into your calendar items and appointments. The must have feature here is the automatic buffering of a meeting’s reminder based on estimated travel time!

Traffic

Lots of coverage has focused on Live Local being the first major mapping site to offer traffic flow data drawn right on the streets as an overlay. Slick indeed, but when you add a layer of real-time Traffic Cameras for a region, you suddenly have an indispensable tool that you’ll bookmark and use everyday. Check this out in Houston for example. The traffic Camera overlay is via a bit of user generated content that takes advantage of another new feature in this release known as Collections. Check to see if a traffic cam Collection already exists for your city and if not why not be the first to create it. Your entire city will thank you!

Collections and Live Favorites

Collections are just what they sound like – a grouping of stuff on your Scratchpad that you want to save together. From a list of restaurant recommendations that your friends have told you about, to a Collection of your best hikes in Italy. Collections are easy to create and share, and with the integration we’ve added for Live Favorites, it’s also easy to keep track of Collections sent to you by friends that you want to recall later. Lets say they send you this Collection of Beach videos from TurnHere.com. In the viewer is an ‘Add to Favorites’ link that will add a permalink for the Collection to your live Favorites. You can then view all of your faves from within Live Local by going to the ‘Collections -> Favorites’ menu.

As you can see, we packed a lot into this release.  Give it a try and let us know what you think. Your feedback will shape the next release, just as it has these past three. And for the coders reading this, all of the details of the latest map control and API can be found on Alex Daley’s blog so you can get started building all of this goodness into your own applications..

---Chandu Thota, Steve Lombardi and the entire Virtual Earth Team

Here in Search, we are always interested in hearing about ways to improve the search experience. And, along with Danny Sullivan and Dave Winer, customers have let us know that they wanted us to change how we used Open Directory descriptions in search results. So… we did!

Just to give some background, the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org is a repository of millions of human-edited descriptions. Even though these human-edited descriptions provide a lot of value, with human editing may come human error, bias, descriptions getting outdated, or the editor’s text may simply not suit the webmasters who want to be represented in their own way.

What has bothered the webmasters previously is that when search engines preferred search result descriptions from dmoz.org, they did not empower webmasters to opt-out of those descriptions. This can be especially annoying if the descriptions from dmoz.org are outdated, or just plain inaccurate.

We had one customer who was frustrated because the ODP description of their site mentioned “favours” and was listed under Canada when their site was actually in the United States and was spelled as “favors”. All they wanted was a way to specify that MSN Search should use the description from their page instead of using ODP.

So what we did was introduce a new option at the page level  - a robots meta tag – that tells the MSN search bot not to use the DMOZ site snippet.  This is something that only can be done at Web page level, by a webmaster, and is not done as part of the robot.txt file.

So in your Web page you’d put

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

or

<META NAME="msnbot" CONTENT="NOODP">

In theory the first of these applies to all crawlers and the second just to us. As far as we know right now, we are the only search engine  to support this  tag, so the two are the same for the moment. But when others follow suit, you could use the second tag to get only MSN to ignore ODP content for your page.

 
A word of caution: Putting either tag in your pages will not make your search results descriptions change immediately – they will change once our crawler has re-crawled the page. Usually that takes about 1 day -4 weeks for us to re-crawl you (ok, that sounds odd, but we hope you know what we mean).  :)  

Try it out, and give us your feedback!

Girish Kumar, MSN Search Development Lead

Betsynote: In advance of questions – Yes, this works stuff in Firefox. Yes, I want to go shopping.

We are pleased to announce the beta release of Windows Live Product Search (http://products.live.com).

Product search leverages the latest research from Microsoft Research Asia to find products available on the internet for sale.  At beta, the index contains commercial offers from over 100,000 sellers, which is made possible by integrating new algorithmic product classifiers and information extraction technology into the search system.

Traditional shopping search sites enable search over data provided by select merchants.  Leveraging a wide range of information on the web enables indexing of hard-to-find and unique products and sellers available online.  Try searching for your favorite products or give the following team favorites a try: alien queen 1/4 scale, bhindi masala, or Andrew Jackson signed documents.

The user interface stays true to the simplicity of the search paradigm and inherits many features common to the Windows Live search family such as smart scroll, image hovering, and level of detail slider.  In addition, users are able to refine their searches by: Related term, Brand, Seller and Price.

There are still many features that that are not yet implemented in the initial Beta for Product Search.  These features include: product ratings & reviews, item clustering and a bigger selection. The product team is continually working on improving the quality of the site and would love to get your feedback: http://feedback.live.com/default.aspx?productkey=wlsearchproduct&P1

You can find more information about Product search and the Product search team on the Windows Live Product search Blog (http://spaces.msn.com/productsearch)

-- Imran Aziz, Lead Program Manager
On behalf of the Windows Live Product Search team.