Live Search

Update your RSS readers and bookmarks!

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:41:14 GMT

Over 3½ years ago, the Live Search team started a blog. About two years ago we started this blog on Windows Live Spaces. Since then, each post on the original blog has been mirrored to Live Spaces.

To end the redundancy, on April 7, 2008 we will retire the blog on Live Spaces. The official team blog will continue at http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch.

If you subscribe to this blog via RSS reader, please update the link to:

http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/rss.xml (for RSS 2.0)
http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/atom.xml (for Atom)

We look forward to continuing the dialog at http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch!

The Live Search team

Snow reports for skiers and boarders

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:06:41 GMT

With the winter in full swing, we're excited to announce snow reports for skiers and snowboarders! Search for any ski resort in the United States or Canada to get conditions before you head to the mountain. Links to the resort's site and a link to a map are also shown.

Below is the report for Whistler (a great place in British Columbia):

Of course, we have to be careful about showing conditions only when they're relevant. For example, most people may not think of skiing when they search for blackjack, even though that's the name of a mountain in Michigan. In this case we don't show snow conditions unless you specifically ask for them. Either Blackjack snow report or current conditions at blackjack does the trick.

We also don't show conditions if they haven't been updated by the resort in the past 24 hours.

You can also get conditions in your favorite ski area (try snow at Lake Tahoe) or state. For example, CO snow report shows top resorts in Colorado with new snow and base depth info:

To keep things compact (Web results are important!) the four mountains with the most new snow are shown automatically. If you're interested in one that didn't make the list, a link to the complete snow report is there too.

Check it out - we'd love to hear what you think.

- The Live Search team

Tafiti Search Visualization (Silverlight + Live Search API) Source Code available

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:59:28 GMT

The source code for http://www.tafiti.com/ is available!

What is Tafiti? It is a search visualization website which brings a new user experience to researching (searching and storing results). It was originally created by Microsoft to demonstrate Silverlight and the Windows Live Search APIs.

Today the Windows Live Platform team announced the release of the Tafiti Search Visualization source code to CodePlex which means any developer can download, modify, and resell the code (see MS-PL License for all the details).

Tafiti has been released as a Windows Live Quick Application via CodePlex, which is a set of demos developers can download and use as reference implementations or starter kits for the Windows Live Platform.

You can see Tafiti running at http://tafiti.mslivelabs.com (or see the original with the Halo3 skin) and to understand how to use it read the walkthrough or watch the video (4.5 minutes).

For more information see the announcement on dev.live.com or on Angus Logan's blog.

Thanks!

Webmaster Tools: Open for Business

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 23:37:14 GMT

This week we're excited to announce that the Live Search Webmaster Center has moved out of its closed beta and we are now open for a public beta. In conjunction with this release we want to announce the creation of the Live Search Webmaster Center blog. In an effort to serve our webmaster community better we will be sharing information on how to improve your crawlablity and visibility.

We want the center and the blog to be a place for two way communication between Live Search and the webmaster community because we understand that SEO's and webmasters need this kind of information and the tools we are building to keep their sites performing well.

In the coming weeks we'll blog in detail about the improvements that we've made. Being a webmaster is what you do best. We want to provide a service that will help make you even better. Enjoy!

- The Live Search Webmaster Center Team

Summarizing user reviews for computers and electronics

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:52:02 GMT

Users have told us that product reviews are one of the most important research tools they use when shopping for products. The Internet has lots of reviews, but they're usually spread across many sites, which makes finding and reading all of them time consuming.

Our team saw this as a great opportunity to help. As alluded to in a previous post, we recently launched a new feature that finds, analyzes and summarizes reviews from across the Web in a single place. Our search results for popular computers and electronics now include graphical summaries of reviews from people across the Web. The summaries highlight the most discussed aspects (e.g. size, battery life) of each product and the percentage of positive and negative opinions expressed.

For example, try the query hp printers and click a printer such as the LaserJet 2600n.

You can see a graphical summary of user reviews in the form of green bars on the left and click on the different aspects discussed such as "Price", "Print Quality", or "Speed". Here's a screenshot of positive comments about the printer's speed. From users' comments I can quickly see that a majority of users on many different review sites think that the printer is fast.

However, when I read negative comments I learn that many users complain about the printer speed, especially for its startup speed and black and white prints. It may have been difficult to read every review for the product to find these comments, but the summary automatically lifts out comments about this important aspect of the printer's speed.

See our previous blog post for some other computers and electronics searches to try. Click results with star ratings to see summarizations for products with many reviews.

As you can imagine, summarizing reviews can be tricky. There are some cases where it's easier to classify comments as positive or negative and identify the aspect discussed. For example, the following comments are concise and clearly mention aspects of the product such as "easy to use" or "support."

"Very easy to use"
"Cons: HP will not be supporting this per their website."

However, consider the following cases. These comments are trickier and there are an infinite combination of these and other types of issues in natural language.

"The best budget laser color created by hp" - this comment was correctly associated with other positive opinions about "Price" even though it doesn't contain the word "price." This requires understanding the fact that the word "budget" is synonymous with a good price.
"I love it, you just have to be careful with it because it's somewhat fragile" - this comment is part positive and part negative requiring careful handling.
"I ordered the product online and waited anxiously" - this comment says nothing about the quality of the product and needs to be ignored during summarization.
"The manual duplex is real easy to use" - this comment mentions "manual," which is a word with multiple meanings. One meaning of the word is product documentation, which is a commonly discussed aspect of products. However, this comment is talking about a printing capability called "manual duplex". This type of word ambiguity can cause the comment to be misclassified as discussing product documentation.

Because of these challenges, it took a lot of effort and help from Microsoft researchers to develop this feature for popular computers and electronics. Also, the summarization isn't always perfect and occasionally misclassifies comments so we're working hard to continually improve the accuracy of this technology.

We hope that this feature saves you time and helps you find the most interesting user opinions about a product without requiring multiple searches and scanning through pages of reviews.

Please let us know what you think!

How we learned to find zune.net

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:30:24 GMT

As far as I can tell, it’s still not exceptionally well-known that the homepage for the Microsoft Zune is actually www.zune.net, and not zune.com. You’ll find two things if you assume the latter: that there’s no page for you at that address, and until recently, if you get forwarded on to your default search engine, chances are pretty good it won’t help you figure out what went wrong. Our result page, in fact, had no results at all. Oops.

In the past, our handling of searches that look like URLs had been very simple: the web results contained only documents from that site. Searching for zune.com, you’d get documents only from zune.com. Sometimes this was great, usually it was okay, and sometimes it was pretty unhelpful. We were unhappy enough with it that we decided to try something a little different.

With our recent release, we’ve significantly changed the way we handle searches that resemble URLs. We show a lot more results instead of a restricted narrow set and that doesn’t just include pages that mention the URL you’ve entered.

Try these searches, I think they’ll illustrate it best: zune.com, cityofredmond.gov, live.com.If you’re looking for a more literal interpretation of the URL—for instance, to get sites that mention a given URL—try wrapping it in quotes: “zune.com”.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks,

The Live Search Team

Drive for show, Putt for Dough - 10 Reasons to Love the New Live Search Maps

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:49:58 GMT

Software engineers tend to spend a lot more time working out at the driving range than they do the putting green. Left on our own we'd all be working on stuff like 3D Birds Eye navigation or robotic building modeling; doing a local search for a coffee shop would require first getting strapped up like this Microsoft Researcher to the right so that we could predict where you wanted to find it and if you prefer decaf. Fortunately our team is lead by a seasoned cast of veteran cat herders who continuously remind us how important it is to be creating and improving the core features you use everyday at our site - driving directions, geocoding, map navigation, local search... else you might not want to return to explore Collections and create 3D tours.

When we launched the Gemini release of Live Search Maps last week there was plenty of coverage of the new gee-wiz features like 3D modeling. Now I present to you my list of the top 10 improvements aimed at delighting you; features that quietly improve your daily experience and at the same time make the more talked about features really shine. To go with another sports analogy, I present to you the starting offensive line of Live Search Maps :-)

1. Rolled up routes or Abbreviated Directions. I guess I don't really know what to call it, I just wonder why no one thought of it sooner. The idea here is that you are usually familiar with either the start or end of your route and don't need to take a giant printout with you of all of the steps telling you how to get from your house to the highway. For instance, here is a route from University Gardens to Reagan Airport in DC. If you live in University Gardens, the first 9 of these 16 steps are burned into your head already and just get in the way when you're in the car. the final steps are the ones you really need and would normally be printed on a second sheet of paper. Live Search Maps now lets you 'roll up' the starting steps, greatly simplifying your route instructions as seen here and prints nicely on a single sheet of paper.

2. Improved Directions Printing. When printing your routes to take with you in the car, a number of improvements were made to improve readability as well as the instructions themselves. The most obvious are the font, color, and grouping changes but it goes much further. My favorite is the "You've gone too far if..." hint. When one person gives directions to another, its very natural to say something like "if you hit Thomas Street you went too far". As you can see in this route, Live maps is now doing the same thing, telling you "The last intersection is E Olive Way. If you reach E Thomas St, you've gone too far". Also, we've added highway shields and turn icons to the printout that are easy to see at a glance while driving.

3. Category Browsing in an Unfamiliar area. If you're traveling to a new city one of the first things you might do is enter the city name to get a map. But what next? Chances are that you want to explore the area and see what businesses are nearby. In this version of Live Maps we've added Yellow Page category browsing and put it right on the result panel after doing a location search. You can dive into the most popular yellow page categories or click 'Browse all categories' to drill in from the top of the category hierarchy. The count of businesses in each category is updated as you move around the map. For instance, after a search for Topeka, KS I selected Restaurants and then barbeque to see business listings for BBQ places. Above the results is a 'breadcrumb trail' that helps you walk back up the category hierarchy; in this link you can see I stepped all the way back to the top, then drilled into Health and Beauty -> Doctors and Clinics -> Pediatricians.

4. Ghost nodes while drawing lines and shapes. When Google came out with their implementation of Live Search Maps' Collections a few months back (known as My Maps) they added a very nifty editing feature we hadn't thought of. I liked it so much that I offered a congratulatory beer to the engineer that came up with it; an offer that was never taken up but still stands :-) We've added the feature (which I dubbed ghost node editing) to this release and made some enhancements of our own making re-shaping a line or polygon smooth like butter. In edit mode when you hover over a line segment a ghosted node appears and follows your mouse. Just click at the place you want to split the segment and drag the new node. You can reshape a polygon so quickly and accurately that it won't seem like work anymore. Another fabulous but often overlooked feature in this area is the real-time distance tooltip while drawing that lets you know how big your object is. For polygons we also show you the area of your shape when you are done editing - even for complex geometries.

5. Severe Traffic indication. We've added a 4th class of traffic speed to the overlay of traffic flow indicating a complete log jam. Previously we had green, yellow and red highlighting to indicate traffic speeds. But feedback from users was that the red category (0 to 15 mph) was too large and in fact there's a big difference in being caught in traffic that isn't moving at all versus at least rolling along at 10mph. So black was born and now indicates where you'll be completely camped out while red is at least crawling.

6. Subscribe to changes in a KML file via RSS. Earlier this year we introduced a feature to enable you to pluck an RSS feed for a Collection for use in your news reader of choice. All of the convenience of staying up to date on your favorite blogs brought to spatial data! With this release we've extended this support to KML files hosted on the web. Best of all, using it is identical to plucking a feed for a Collection. Once added to your news reader, you'll be alerted whenever the author of the original KML makes edits or additions to their file. Best illustrated with an example. Here is a KML file showing the location of moon trees planted in the US. When the KML viewer opens you can click the subscribe button to grab its RSS feed and add it to your newsreader. [like this] behind the scenes, what is served out is the GeoRSS flavor of RSS so your KML subscription is viewable in traditional readers as well as those with explicit support for Geography! When the author adds or edits the original file, changes will show up at the top of the news feed.

7. Force Feedback with XBOX controller. If you use the XBOX controller to fly through VE3D maps, you’ll now notice that if you bump into buildings or the ground the controller vibrates. This is especially handy when you back into something.

8. Category Sensitive Details page. Each business listing at Live Search Maps has a details page that acts like a 'homepage' for the business, displaying a summary of everything we know about it. Basic address/phone number info, storefront photos, ratings & reviews, 1-click directions (party maps) and much more, all laid out in a really crisp style. There's also a bunch of information about the business that has been crawled from the web or supplied directly to us from partners like Judy's Book and CitySearch. All together it adds up to a very exhaustive look at the business that should prove really helpful when making a choice among many options. My favorite addition to the details page is the category specific information provided by InfoUSA, Expedia, WCities and others. To view this info click the 'expand' links like the one shown here. Some of the categories that have this feature include:

Dentists - Number of chairs, patients seen each week, Medical School...
Hotels - direct reservation links, price range, hotel class, nearest airport code, ...
Doctors - gender, size of practice, number of staff...
Restaurants - average price, reservation info, outdoor seating...

9. Traffic sensitive routing. when you live in a congested city like LA or Seattle being able to generate driving directions that take you around the traffic can have huge benefits. We introduced real-time traffic flow overlays in Live Search Maps last year which is helpful and now we've taken it a big step further. instead of just showing you the hotspots along with a route that takes you right through them, we can now automatically route you around the traffic. In areas where we have real-time traffic information check the 'route based traffic' option as shown to the left and we'll take care of the rest.

10. Transparent Buildings. The ability to share tours of your Collections is a great new feature in this release. If your tour happens to take the viewer through one of our densely populated 3D cities chances are that some of the textured buildings will get in the camera path that you want to fly the user through. The 3D team came up with a really clever solution to this problem - buildings that find themselves in the camera's path ghost out temporarily, becoming semi-transparent as the camera approaches and flys through. its a wonderful subtle effect that greatly improves the tour experience. You can see this in the screen capture below or you can grab the full resolution video from my SkyDrive here to view it yourself.

There's more I'd like to get to, but I'll save it for a future post and keep this list to 10. Although the Gemini release is only 1 week old, we're already deep into work on the next release. We hope while you are enjoying all of the new stuff in the latest Live Search Maps that you'll take a moment to provide feedback and your wishlist for future versions. post your feedback in comments here or email me directly at SteveLom (at) microsoft d com.

Steve Lombardi
Virtual Earth Program Manager

Keep up with the latest Virtual Earth and Live Search Maps news at our Act Global, Search Local Blog

“Do what I mean, not what I say!” [Part 2 of 2]

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:36:19 GMT

Continuing on with our “Do what I mean, not what I say”, blog post from last time, here are some additional categories we tackled with this initiative.

Equivalencies

“We do really badly on the query ca chp” a coworker complained in one email.

“Ca chp?” I thought. “What the heck does that mean?”

It turned out it was pretty simple: “ca” was short for California and “chp” was short for California highway patrol. Obviously, my coworker knew what he meant by the query ca chp, but I didn’t know it, and our search engine definitely didn’t know it. After seeing many complaints from customers of this sort we began to realize that to truly improve the relevance of our search engine, it was more confirmation that we had to move past just simple keyword matching, and into understanding the intent of your query.

So when you search for crossroads mall in OKC we take this to mean crossroads mall in Oklahoma City. When you search for Julia child bio we’ll also look for Julia child biography to give you better results. But of course, the same word could mean something different in another context. Hence, when you search for nw university we we’ll search for northwestern university but if you search for nw co-ed soccer we’ll search for northwest co-ed soccer instead.

Intelligent “stop word” retention

Another area that fell under the “Do what I mean, not what I say!” category were “stop words”.

What are “stop words” you ask?

Well, in Search Engine parlance they are words that oftentimes may not contain much “meaning” in the query - words such as (a, the, in, etc…) and hence it may not be crucial as to whether they are found on the desired results page or not. For example if the query was the aurora borealis, you probably wouldn’t be too concerned as to whether the word “the” was found on the top page returned or not, since “the” doesn’t contain much meaning here. Hence, it may be perfectly acceptable to drop it from the query when retrieving pages.

However, if your query was The Office (the title of a popular televisions show) it would be absolutely ridiculous to drop the word “the” since the query would essentially change meaning - and we received a lot of emails about how we were doing just that. In fact, previously we were routinely dropping all stop words – and knew this needed dramatic improvement.

In our recent release we’ve overhauled our logic, and if you search for something where the “stop words” contain crucial meaning, we can sense thatand realize that “the” in The Office is crucial, or the “A” in Avenue A is crucial; Whereas if you query for something like the aurora borealis we realize that the word “the” isn’t as crucial as the other query words.

Thanks, and let us know what you think!

“Do what I mean, not what I say!” [Part 1 of 2]

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 06:48:37 GMT

Yes, that's an odd title, let me explain.

We've been working on returning the very best search results for your intent, not just for the particular search terms that you happen to have chosen as a vehicle to transmit that intent. There's an important difference there and it's been our focus for quite some time.

For example, let's suppose that you've decided to move to the state of Arizona. You'd like to double check that how hot it gets there so you search for hottest temperature in the state of az. In this case, the intent of the query was different than the search terms entered: it would be unfortunate if a particularly good result was excluded from the results simply because it contained the term Arizona instead of the abbreviation AZ.

In the new release of Live Search we've made a number of improvements in this area of more deeply understanding user intent.

AutoSpell Correction

The first example of this is our new AutoSpell feature.

If we are absolutely, completely, totally, "no doubt about it" confident you misspelled one of your search terms, we automatically deliver a page that includes spell-corrected results, rather than a page of misspelled results accompanied by a "Did you mean _______?" link at the top.

For example, there's this pizza place near Microsoft called Pagliacci Pizza that is fantastic. The problem is that I can never remember the correct spelling of the place. My misspelled attempts are usually something along the lines of {Pagliaci Pizza}, {Pagliaccis Pizza} or {Paggliacci Pizza}...

With AutoSpell correction I get the correct result the first time, regardless of the misspelling. Instead of being two clicks away from pizza, I'm just one. Being two clicks away just keeps people hungry, rather than satisfying their intent!

In the (hopefully) rare case that you ever see a mistaken correction in our AutoSpell feature, we provide a recourse link at the top of the page to enforce your original spelling.

Stemming

Another improvement in the "Do what I mean, not what I say" category is stemming. Stemming means matching on the "stem" (or root) of the word rather than the exact word.

For example, users told us that the search half price book Redmond returned horrible results. Searching for half price books Redmond produced much better results. In our new release of Live Search, searches for half price book Redmond automatically include results with books in them as well.

Our team knew that tackling stemming would give us the improvements we needed for searches like these. But we had to be careful, because you can't just stem all the time-you have to be smart about it. An example of this is the word cable. When you search for "cable," you could be looking for information on cable TV providers. When you search for "cables", you could be looking for power, telephone, or network cables.

We're really happy with the improvements that stemming has made in Live Search. Like everything else in the product, we will continue to tune and tweak things to give our users the best experience.These are just the first two of several areas we tackled in the area of "Do what I mean, not what I say." We'll be back soon to post about a few other items we released in this area. Thanks and please let us know what you think!

3 New Updates to Live Search Mobile

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 07:12:38 GMT

On Monday the 15^th we also released a number of updates for our Live Search Mobile products, including:

Voice input and gas prices in Live Search for Windows Mobile,
A new beta for BlackBerry devices, and
Improved mapping and directions in browser-based search for any mobile phone

Details are below - please check them out and let us know what you think!

Voice Input and Gas Prices Now in Live Search for Windows Mobile

Live Search has been a hit with Windows Mobile enthusiasts (read a few reviews here and here) for awhile now. It's a great way to get local search, mapping and navigation and today we're making it even better.

You can now speak your query instead of typing it! Just press the lower left soft-key and say what you want, for example, "Anthony's Pizza" or "Hardware Stores". We use advanced voice recognition technology to understand what you're asking for and give you results.

So far we've found it to be a really fast way to get answers for most searches. This feature is currently in beta so let us know how well it works for you! If it doesn't recognize something you say, of course you can still type it in like you used to.

Another new feature is the ability to find nearby gas stations with the best prices. Enter your location, select the Gas Prices icon, and you'll see gas stations sorted by recent prices for regular unleaded gas. Hours of operation are now included for many restaurants as well.

You can download the latest version from your phone at wls.live.com or read more information from your PC.

New - Live Search for BlackBerry® devices (Beta)

Today we're also releasing a beta version of Live Search for our friends with BlackBerry devices. It runs on BlackBerry version 4.0.2 and higher and provides the main benefits** of Live Search in an experience custom-designed for the BlackBerry.

You can download it now from your BlackBerry browser at wls.live.com or learn more on your PC. Please let us know what you think!

** The BlackBerry version provides local business search, mapping location, getting movie showtimes and traffic information. It does not include voice input, gas prices, business ratings and hours of operation at this time.

Improved Mapping and Directions in Live Search via mobile browser

Our browser based mobile search at m.live.com is the core of our mobile search products. It's available on any mobile phone with Internet access and searches the broadest types of information-including websites, images, and news, as well as local businesses, maps, directions, and more.

We've made a number of improvements to it-especially in mapping and navigation.

We're using new map styles throughout this product that make the maps even more readable on small screens. Our directions now also take into account current traffic conditions-and if traffic is especially bad you can choose to have the system reroute you to avoid traffic backups.

We're also using the same driving direction hints as on the desktop version of Live Search Maps. These hints give you the final cross streets in your route so you don't drive too far.

Frequently accessed information like weather, stock quotes, and movie times will automatically appear on the main results page when you search for them.

To try it, go to m.live.com from your mobile phone's Web browser to try it for yourself, or learn more from your PC.

Please send any feedback you have to lsmobile@microsoft.com, we'd love to hear from you!

Announcing Live Search 411 (1-800-CALL-411)

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:28:14 GMT

On Monday we announced a new service that brings the power of local search to any phone-and lets you access it just by speaking.

Think about all the times you need to find quick local information: you're driving home from work and need make reservations at your favorite restaurant. Or maybe you're already downtown, and want to get movie times for theaters nearby along with a map and directions. Or perhaps you're traveling and want to call the car rental agency to avoid the lines at the airport counter.

Live Search 411 enables you to do this for free, from any phone in the US. Just call 1-800-CALL-411 (1-800-225-5411) and say where you are and what you're looking for. You can also get text messages, maps, traffic maps, and text-based driving directions sent to your mobile phone (with a service plan that supports text messages or data access, of course!).

We've built this system in cooperation with Tellme, which we acquired in March of this year. Tellme has been a leader in voice technology since 1999. We're excited about the voice experience and attention to detail they bring to this new service.

We've built Live Search 411 to go beyond just finding business information. Because our goal is to help you complete your task, we've included features like:

Connect to any business listing you find-for free
Receive SMS links to maps, driving directions and traffic conditions (just say "text me the info")
Get movie showtimes and even buy tickets over the phone (via our partnership with Fandango)
Share text messages of business details with friends so they can easily meet you there
Hear the current weather conditions and the forecast
Quickly access travel resources like airlines, hotels, and rental cars
Remember your personalized locations for movie theaters, weather and traffic, and your preferences for receiving text messages.

Try it now

The best way to learn more is to try the service now at 1-800-CALL-411. These audio demos also give you a taste of what to expect:

More info is also on our website. Please let us know what you think by sending feedback to ls411@microsoft.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

New and improved product results in Web search

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:48:42 GMT

It’s no surprise to anyone who uses the Web that shopping is one of the leading online activities. Many people use the Internet to research their next purchase or buy products online. We’re here to help you find the product information you care about and make informed decisions. We’ve recently launched a richer experience when searching for products—from broad categories such as digital cameras to specific products such as Nikon d40.

Product Category Searches
For category searches we now show you popular products within that category. The average rating and sales price are shown below the product image with an option to browse more products on MSN Shopping. You can also research products you are interested in by reading the collection of user reviews and viewing a summary of the overall opinion that users have about that product. We’ve indexed millions of products and user reviews through a combination of crawling Web sites and obtaining feeds from partner sites.

Computers and electronics are the most popular categories for product research online and this is where we put a lot of focus for this release. But—because we know people look for other products (like Gucci bags) and not just Lcd tvs or Mp3 players—we will continue to increase our selection and depth for more categories in the future.

Searches to try: Digital cameras, Camcorders, Nikon digital cameras, Wireless headphones, Bulova watches, Gucci bags, Motorola cell phones

Specific Product Searches
Searches for specific products—such as Nikon d40—now show a quick summary of the product, including a graphical summary of user opinions (called “User reviews at a glance”). Keep an eye out for a more detailed post on this brand new feature soon.

The team is continuously working on ensuring that product name variations trigger the relevant product results. For example, as of this posting “Canon Rebel XT” doesn’t trigger a product, but Canon Rebel XTi does.

Searches to try: Nikon d40, Canon Rebel xti, Microsoft Zune, Palm Treo 650, Sony Ericsson k750i, Canon eos 5d, AT&T 8525, Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T100

Clicking on a product with ratings takes you to a detailed product summary page. This page enables you to visually explore user opinions on various aspects of the product (quality, ease of use, etc) and filter them by both positive and negative opinions.

We look forward to your feedback to help us improve product results within Live Search. We hope you enjoy using the new features we’ve recently rolled out!

Relevance, Relevance, Relevance!

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 07:30:15 GMT

In building 88 on Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, WA there is a small, but growing group of us that think about relevance constantly. We eat, live and breathe ideas and technology that makes our relevance better. Having worked on this release for a little over 9 months we could not be more excited about the relevance of our new engine. From our metrics, and more importantly our usage as customers, our new engine is so far superior to our old one. Consider this post a little tour guide, if you will, of our new engine and the things you might notice when you use it.

Improved core relevance
Core relevance is a hard thing to quantify or qualify. I think of it as those real searches you do day in and day out. When people do fancy demos they use searches like Britney Spears…which is an important search, but doesn’t really reflect some of the tough things the engine sees every day.

I was trying to think of a good example of this and just as I was writing, bam, a bunch of us decided to head to our favorite spot for lunch: the Microsoft taco truck. I was kind of curious what would come up for Microsoft taco truck. Sure enough, Live Search has good stuff. The chowhound.com result in particular has some great commentary which talks about the “secret” location in the VFW parking lot. If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend it.

This is core relevance.

Reduced spam
Spam is an arms race. A game of cat and mouse. We’re always going to be fighting people who threaten the integrity of our results by using illegitimate or malicious techniques. With this release of Live Search you should find the amount of spam is down quite considerably.

You might ask how we know spam is down? Experts on our team take a “randomly selected and statistically significant” set of searches and measure the percentage of spam in the results. With this release that number is down in a non-trivial manner and we are excited about that.

Dramatically improved ”snippets”
One of the areas of search that does not get a lot of attention (but is incredibly important) are those little snippets of text or “summaries” for each result that describe the site you’re about to visit. Let me give you a flavor of some of our improvements in this area:

Muse Starlight: No more JavaScript issues
FBI: Notice we expand the acronym (to "Federal Bureau of Investigation") and highlight it in the descriptions
Microsoft: Navigational links indented in the first result help you find what you are looking for quickly.

We’ll blog more about this topic soon. Stay tuned.

Much bigger index!
We are now searching 20 billion Web pages. This is 4 times the size of our previous index. Enough said.

Well, one more thing – we now have the infrastructure to easily add billions (yes, billions) more with relative ease. This ensures we are always pushing the envelope with regard to the amount of human knowledge in our index.

Do what you mean, not what you say
Last, but not least, we want users to be able to search in the manner they feel most comfortable. It’s our job to be doing the smart thing to figure out what people really mean. Here’s an example search from a real user: nw coed soccer. Previously we did not take into account that NW and Northwest are equivalents. Now we do. The result? Better relevance. See for yourself.

This post covered about some of the work we’ve done to improve our core web results. Over the coming weeks we will talk these features in more detail.

We’re very excited about the improvements and we hope you will be, too. Thanks and please don’t hesitate to send us your feedback!

Microsoft acquires Jellyfish.com

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 02:19:29 GMT

We want to welcome some new folks to the Live Search family - we recently purchased a company called Jellyfish.com, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Jellyfish has done some really innovative work in comparative shopping engines. We think the technology has some interesting potential applications as we continue to invest heavily in shopping and commerce as a key component of Live Search. Stay tuned for more great stuff from our new colleagues in Madison!

Introducing...the new Live Search

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 04:09:44 GMT

This week we’re excited to launch a major update to Live Search that’s relevant, faster and easier to use. Hundreds of us rolled up our sleeves and dug deep. We pored over your feedback, analyzed the data and talked to thousands of users. How major is this? It’s our biggest update since our debut in January 2005.

Here are just some of the areas we focused on:

Relevance, relevance, relevance. We’ve quadrupled the size of our index, which means we can return the right results for your searches. Improvements like enhanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling help us return the best results.
Speed. Pages load much faster than before.
Streamlined look and feel. We focused on the end-to-end experience from the homepage throughout the site. For example, search results are now easier to read thanks to work on typography, contrast, colors and spacing.
More high-interest content. You asked us for more in Entertainment, Shopping, Health, Local and Video search and we’re happy to deliver it.

In the coming weeks we’ll blog in detail about the improvements that we’ve made. You can also check out the press release that just hit the wire and the fact sheet for more information.

The end result is a service we believe is better across the board. Enjoy! We’re psyched to hear what you think.**

-The Live Search team

**The release is rolling out worldwide as we speak. The links above should take you directly into the new experience if you’re not already seeing it on your own!

Our New Webmaster Portal and an Invitation to the Private Beta

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:03:24 GMT

Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the “link:” operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get “link:” back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO. Initially we’ll support these scenarios:

Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
Statistics about your website
Consolidation of content submission resources
New content and community resources

While we expect the tools to be available publicly in late Fall, we still have some polishing to do. In the meantime we’ve created a private beta program to let adventuresome folks get their hands on the tools sooner – and help polish things by providing feedback. If you’re interested in participating in the beta program over the next few months, please send a mail to lswmp@microsoft.com to apply!

-- Nathan Buggia, Sr. Product Manager - Webmaster & Developer
-- Ryan Burkhardt, Group Program Manager - Webmaster & Developer

Live Search @ SES San Jose

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:09:22 GMT

For those of you attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, CA this week, drop by and check us out at one of these sessions:

Search Engine Q&A On Links – Day 3 at 4:45pm (8/22)
Join Eytan Seidman, Lead Program Manager for the Live Search crawler, to answer your questions about links.
Meet the Crawlers – Day 4 at 10:45am (8/23)
More fun with Eytan, here to answer your questions about how to submit and provide content to Live Search. (have you seen our new product upload service?)

Also, be sure to check out our after hours event:

Live Search Mixer for SEO Professionals – Day 3 (8/22) at 7:00pm
Stop by to mingle with the team behind sitemaps and a few forthcoming offerings for webmasters – and don’t forget your business cards. Attendance is very limited, email: nbuggia {at} microsoft {.} com to RSVP.

We look forward to seeing you there!
-- Nathan Buggia, Live Search Product Manager

Three new features in Live Search Images

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:53:37 GMT

We know you love searching for people with our image search engine—we’ve worked hard to make it easy and fun. Now we’ve made it even better. Today we shipped three new features that help you find faces, portraits and black and white images. Try these links to see them in action:

without the new features – jimi hendrix
with new face filtering on – jimi hendrix filter:face
with new portrait filtering on – jimi hendrix filter:portrait
with new black and white filtering on – jimi hendrix filter:bw

Make sure you also test our Related People feature on the right side of the screen.

For now, the way you access these new features is by typing. You’ll need to add filter:face, filter:portrait, or filter:bw to your query. While we’re thinking about how to make these features intuitively accessible through a drop-down menu or some other means, we’d love your feedback on them. Enjoy!

Cheers, Hugh

Dev Manager, Live Search Images

Live Search Books: Now with In-Copyright Content

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 10:07:49 GMT

Today we're delighted to announce the availability of in-copyright book content in the Beta version of Live Search Books!

For hundreds of years books have been the repositories for the world’s most trusted, authoritative knowledge. But until recently, books have been invisible to the world’s search engines. Change is afoot! Starting today, you’ll find search query results from in-copyright books in Live Search Books. The integration of this valuable content will help us improve our ability to answer your questions and point you toward useful sources for additional information. The Live Search Books offering is part of our larger Live Search strategy to deliver the most relevant information possible to our customers in a seamless experience that integrates results culled from a variety of essential sources.

Those of you who have tried Live Search Academic, our search service for scholarly publications, are already familiar with our unique two-pane interface that makes it easy to scan and preview search results. We've carried over that successful design to Live Search Books and made it even better! Our design makes it easy to quickly figure out if a book is relevant to your search, then jump to the relevant information within that book. The preview pane includes a cover image, summary of the book and table of contents previews (where available), and a new hit density map that makes it easy to see where your search results fall in a given title. Seeing where clusters of results fall makes it easy to get to the relevant section of the book quickly and easily, making the best possible use of limited page previews. To that end, we also have included a page preview counter that tells you how many pages you have left to view within the preview page limit set by the publisher. Of course we also make it easy to search within books: our viewer allows you to search for specific keywords, view full pages or zoom in, flip through page by page, and link to the book’s Table of Contents. If you decide that you want to own the book, we make it easy to buy it with links to the publisher’s ecommerce enabled web site and major online book retailers.

Another thing that you'll notice about Live Search Books is the quality of our scanned images. We are taking particular pains to obtain the highest possible quality images to ensure that our customers are getting the best viewing experience possible.

Today’s release includes books from a wide range of publishers. We have paid particular attention to ensuring that we are only including books in our index that our publishing partners have given us permission to include, so our customers and partners can feel secure in our stance on copyright protection. Here are just a few of our launch partners: Academic Resources Corporation, Amherst Media, Bearport Publishing, Cambridge University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, Harrison House Publishers, Harvard University Press, Hazelden Publishing & Educational Services, Institute for International Economics, John Wiley & Sons Publishing, Lerner Publishing Group, MBI Publishing Company, McGraw-Hill Companies, Microsoft Corporation, MIT Press, OECD, Osprey Publishing, Oxford University Press, Pearson Education, PREP Publishing, Rodale, Rutgers University Press, Simon & Schuster, Springer, SUNY Press, Taylor & Francis Group, The Perseus Books Group, The World Bank, University of Massachusetts Press, Wheatmark, Wilderness Press, World Health Organization, World Scientific Publishing Company, World Wisdom, Yale University Press. There are many more not named here—and many more whose books will be incorporated as we update the index going forward.

Publishers who are interested in submitting content can find out more about the program at publisher.live.com.

Send us your feedback at lsselfbk@microsoft.com and let us know what you think, and be sure to check Live Search Books often as we’ll be adding books to our index on a regular basis.

-- Cliff Guren, Director of Publisher Evangelism, Live Search Selection Team

Search is a Love Problem

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:58:16 GMT

I 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

Photo Album: CES 2007 Las Vegas

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:52:38 GMT

CES 2007 Las Vegas

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Photo Album: Live Search Mobile Beta

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:20:16 GMT

Live Search Mobile Beta

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Photo Album: October 19

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:48:29 GMT

October 19