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June 30 Sunny in SeattleBetsynote: As I type this in for Jamie, it is hot. Darn hot. Too sunny-must-go-kayak-on-the-lake-hot....This is not the Seattle I know!
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Around this time of year, a lot of us here in Redmond like to spend our spare time outside. Summers are beautiful in Washington State and we frequently check the weather to help plan our next hike or boating trip on the lake. We know a lot of you are doing the same.
To get you this information quickly, we recently launched an Instant Answer for weather. We teamed up with MSN Weather to give you the current conditions, high/low temperatures and four day forecast right on our search results page.
You can see this in action by searching for the weather in a specific location, like weather redmond wa or chicago temperature. If you’re a touring rock star and forget where you are, or just madly efficient with your keystrokes - try searching for just weather. We estimate your location and show the temperature near you. This doesn’t always work depending on how you connect to the Internet, but it’s usually pretty close.
In addition to sending feedback on this, we would really like to hear which instant answers you want us to build next. Is there a specific kind of content you want to be able to find faster? Something we could add to our page to make your life just a little bit easier? Please let us know.
--Jamie Buckley, Program Manager, Instant Answers June 28 Need Secure Content?When we launched our search engine for the first time in 2005, we knew we'd be doing a bunch of catch-up. One thing customers really wanted from us that Google and Yahoo! had was HTTPS search - that is, the ability to expose non-secure areas of Web sites which were largely secure. FirstGov.gov and sicher-im-netz.de (a campaign for secure Internet usage in Germany) lead the way in requesting this feature. Once we had the resources to complete it, we got right to work and are happy to report that we got it done.
If you use the Internet for anything more than casual Web-surfing, you probably frequent at least a few secure sites. E-mail and banking Web sites are just a few examples where HTTPS is used. HTTPS is a protocol typically used by websites offering users a service, and keeps third parties from intercepting sensitive information, such as passwords and banking information. However, there is still a lot of public information available on these sites – most notably, the login pages themselves. It’s this public content that we are making available through MSN Search, so that users can better locate the services they need.
For example, suppose a US Bank customer wanted to do some online banking. They may go to search.msn.com and search for US Bank Login. The top result for this query is U.S. Bank Internet Banking – exactly what they were looking for! Using this link, they can login and go about their business. No private information is ever returned in the search results, just the public pages relevant to the query. This is just the latest step in our ongoing effort to provide the most comprehensive index in the business.
As a friendly tip, if you are a site owner, please note that the HTTPS portion of your site is considered separately from a robots.txt perspective and requires its own robots.txt file.
We are constantly looking for more feedback about how to improve our engine – please keep sending them our way! You can submit feedback using this link.
--Brent Hands, Program Manager, Search June 20 Coming Soon: Windows Live Search now inside Windows Live MessengerVery soon, we will release a feature of Windows Live Search built into Windows Live Messenger that we think will help you while chatting with your friends. Tell us what you think! You can try this new Search feature from the activities menu of conversation window, it includes our three most popular scoped search features – Web, News and Images. These scoped results are based on Windows Live Search, so you get the same results as if you were searching on live.com. Have you ever been chatting with a friend, decided to see a movie together, but had to open up a new browser window to see what time the movie was? Now, life is easy. You can preview a result within Messenger and send the result link to your friend by clicking one button. For image search result, you can drag/drop it to set it as your conversation window background or your Display picture, or even send this image to your friend. We use Atlas framework (Microsoft AJAX technology) to build up this feature, which makes our UI more smooth and comfortable. Since we use asynchronous call to get the search results from backend web service, we can render our page layout dynamically. That’s why user won’t feel any page refresh while loading the results. Best of all, the user can preview the first result while other results are still loading their content. In our future release, more exciting features are planned. When a new search scope is launched for live.com, it will be automatically available for our Messenger users.
If you have more feedback than you want to give in the comment section of this blog, please go to the links below….
For news:
For image: We are reading every piece of feedback we receive and will response to comments as soon as we can. So if you have any comments or feature suggestions just post below or use the feedback link
-- Joseph Yao, Program Manager On behalf of the Search Pane team
Betsynote: 5:40 pm June 20 - we had to edit this post after submitting because, well, we jumped the gun in our excitement. When it's properly live, we will confirm it is live on the blog...but in the meantime, be watching for it. June 13 MSDN Using MSN to Build Customer SatisfactionOn April 18th, MSDN launched site-wide its first effort in improving the customer search experience by building a targeted UI that is powered by the MSN SOAP API. This allowed us to offer our customers the following benefits:
· Improved Performance · Content Relevance – Benefit from ever-improving MSN Search · Community Searches across MSDN blogs, Forums, and CodeZone Partner Sites · Customer Feedback opportunities through MSDN Search Blog, and MSN Search Feedback loop.
These features were enhanced by the fact that we built off the MSN Service. The results have been outstanding! In the time since we have launched we have seen big improvements in customers’ responses to search as well as big advances in click throughs on the first page of the results. You can view this new UI at MSDN.
The cool thing for MSDN is that because of the flexibility of MSN, we have been able to listen to the customers and build even more unique experiences in an effort to assist our customers. (To understand the approach take a minute and watch this MSDN TV article). As we examined future possible outcomes and implementations, we came up with the following UI that we would like to introduce for your consideration, our first iteration of these features. You can see the search and play with it at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/search/refinement.aspx.
In contrast to our released design, there are no tabs in our prototype. We removed the tabs because we heard from customers that they didn't see them. But we also heard you wanted the content, so we combined the content into a set of queries we can send to the API and we then use the data returned to let you filter out the content you don't want. For example, if you are searching for a term like “ATLAS,” you can remove the blog sites from the results.
Additionally, it is important to remember because we built on the MSN Search API, in any version you can modify your query with the MSN query language. Here are some examples of how this helps MSDN queries:
So play, have fun, and let us know what you like and don’t like. We are working on a few more features including; Narrow by Product, Narrow by Keyword, Text Suggestion, and more. You can influence this process. If something is not working let us know the query you tried, and what is the nature of the topic you are looking for. We appreciate your feedback and hope to hear from you soon. You can send me feedback at the MSDN Search blog.
---Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager MSDN
June 08 Live for answersWe’re getting a ton of great feedback on Windows Live Search. One of the most common requests is to build the instant answers already available on MSN Search. We hear you and are working hard to get them all in. In fact, we just recently launched our first batch - instant answers for news and local!
The news instant answer will appear on searches for topical news stories. Keywords are identified algorithmically, updated every few minutes. It’s impossible to predict which ones will work when you read this, but iraq and george bush are pretty safe bets.
We can also show the top local listings right on our web results page. This is great when you are looking for a phone number or address of a local business. You just need to type a category or business name along with a location (city, city/state or zip). Try our instant answers to find an edison, nj dentist or seattle pizza places.
Looking for other kinds of instant answers? Found a problem with one we already have? Please send us your feedback. We’re listening.
---Jamie Buckley PM, Instant Answer Team
Betsynote: Thanks to Darren's feedback, we adjusted the link. It should work now. Thanks Darren!!!! June 06 Check out the new Active Search for Windows Live Mail Desktop!(Betsynote:Yes, I know it's a mouthful of a label! But it's pretty cool!)
Our friends over on the Mail Desktop team have been experimenting with ways to bring search right into a user’s inbox experience. Imagine you’ve received an email about the Arlo Guthrie show coming up later this summer...Live Mail Desktop’s Active Search would present search results about this show, as well as sponsored links offering perhaps a chance to buy tickets or read a review of the concert. June 02 Going Places: Accelerating Search in Academic ResearchWe on the Search team want to congratulate the 12 winners of the Microsoft Live Labs "Accelerating Search in Academic Research” Awards. Researchers from 36 countries submitted proposals for research to advance the field of search. The 12 winners will receive grant money from Microsoft Live Labs and access to a set of MSN Search query logs in order to push forward our understanding of the Internet, search, and online social behaviors. The results of the research we’re funding are intended to be totally open to the public. We’re encouraging the awardees to publish what they find in peer reviewed journals and at conferences. Nothing about this is proprietary. It’s our gift back to the research community.
Each researcher, along with their proposal, submitted a budget which was used to determine one–year grant awards of between $30-50,000. They’re also getting access to more than 15 million real-user queries with click through information,along with an increased query quota for use of the MSN Search API. What’s important to know is that the search query logs they will be studying have been carefully scrubbed to be completely anonymous – there’s no information about who issued a query. In addition, we’ve filtered the query terms themselves to remove credit card numbers, phone numbers, social security numbers and email addresses. To support the researchers, the Search team and Microsoft Research staff took extra effort to make sure the data was clean, ensuring both customer privacy is protected while academic inquiry is preserved. Researchers are under strict license in using the data, which also protects customer privacy. We haven’t decided yet whether this RFP program will be awarded next year, but if you’re interested in other funding opportunities with Microsoft, keep checking back here: http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/default.aspx
--Ramez Naam, Director of Program Management, Search |
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