Air travel is always a hassle.  Picking someone up — is the flight on time? Going on a flight — have the terminal and gate changed? You can now check all of this quickly and easily on Live Search.

Live Search is becoming more than just a place to get information — it is also a place you can do things.  We are simplifying key tasks with Active Answers, a new method of retrieving up-to-the-minute data from the Web. To help with your air travel information needs, our first Active Answer release is for flight status. You can type in a specific flight number into the search box (for example, Alaska 328) , and Live Search will provide detailed status information on a particular flight, including terminal and gate information.

You can also do a generic query , flight status, and we’ll display interactive boxes on the results page for the user to fill in. Pretty Cool! 

Look for more Active Answers soon, brought to you by Microsoft Research and Live Search.   

MJ Lee, Senior Program Manager, Live Search

Today at MIX09, our friends on the Internet Explorer team announced the general availability of Internet Explorer 8. In IE8, Web users will see a number of Live Search accelerators that make surfing the Web faster and easier. Here’s a look at what you’ll see.

Live Search Products Accelerator

Most of us have researched or bought something online. And while it is nice to find great deals from the comfort of our homes, the experience itself can be fragmented and frustrating. Typically we have to visit several sites to find all the information that helps us buy the best product.

Live Search is working hard to streamline the process of researching and shopping online. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could compare prices from Live Search to prices on any other site without opening a new page? You can with the Live Search Products accelerator!

If you have not heard of Internet Explorer 8’s accelerators feature, this is a great time to give it a try:

1) Install Internet Explorer 8
2) Install the Shop and Save with Live Search Products accelerator
3) Highlight a word or phrase, click on and see what prices Live Search offers.

Here is an example:

Map with Live Search

Have you ever thought how great it would be to just highlight an address and see a quick map of the location, instead of having to open your favorite map site and enter the address again? Perhaps you are just curious about a place you read about in a news story or you want to validate your general sense of where a museum or restaurant is located. The “Map with Live Search” accelerator provides you with just this functionality! Highlight the place or the address, click the blue arrow, and select “Map with Live Search” from the accelerator menu. The preview window will show you a quick map of where you want to go.

If you want more information, such as restaurants or hotels close by, click on the preview window and a more detailed map will open in a new tab in IE8. Here you will have options to do additional searches.

Translate with Live Search

The Translate with Live Search accelerator gives you easy, one-click translation for common terms in other languages. For example, you might find foreign phrases in newspapers, or on websites of places you want to visit on your next vacation. Just highlight the text that you want to translate, click the blue arrow, and select “Translate with Live Search” from the accelerator menu. You will find the translated text in the preview window. You can even change the translation on the fly — just click on the “Change Language” link at the top of the preview window and select your favorite pair of languages. Give it a shot!

As always, we would love to hear your feedback and thoughts about how we can improve this experience.

Farshid Sedghi, Program Manager, Live Search Products

Debapriya Ray, Senior Product Manager, Live Search

Live Search is busily packing to make a pilgrimage to the annual geek mecca, SXSW Interactive. Our mission is clear: We want to talk to you about search. Sure, you probably like your search just as it is. But we think it can be better. We want to make it better. And we want to hear from you to help us get there.

Find us in the Microsoft booth at the show (March 14–16), roaming the conference halls with a video camera, and chatting up the cool kids at parties. And be sure to come to our BFFing with Live Search Tweetup in the Blogger Lounge on the 3^rd floor of the Austin Convention Center (Friday the 13^th, 4–6pm). Nadia Payan, who we helped get to the conference, will be our special guest.

We also have something special planned for 6th Street festivities. To find out, be sure to follow us on Twitter @Live_Search!

Aya Zook, Product Manager, Live Search

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

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