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.  And 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.net”.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks,
The Live Search Team