Stefan here – long time reader, first time poster. I’m one of the new folks on the Live Search team that Betsy has told you about, and you’ll be seeing more from me in the next few months. Seeing is the operative word in that sentence because the Live Search blog is getting some extreme-video-love courtesy of myself and the good folks at Channel9.
Video, you ask? Everyone knows video viewership on the web is going nowhere…oh wait, never mind, wrong strategy deck. Video is HUGE and does something that text blog posts can’t: allow me to talk to you without that pesky act of using a keyboard.
While I was CES this year, I noticed that people weren’t aware of all the functions search companies (like us) actually build into their engines. Most people still look at search as something into which they type a keyword to get a URL. And while I’d say this is a tremendously useful function, people are missing out on much of the innovation that we’ve spent years developing.
Now if you’re like me, you already have approximately 42000 RSS feeds, tweets, Diggs, and text messages coming at you every day. While I strive to read and absorb all of them, sometimes I just want someone to tell me how to do something without having to read, process, click around, get frustrated, abandon, feel guilty, and then come back later to try it again. I find video blogs provide a good solution to that problem, even if I am told to “turn down those speakers” whenever I rock out to the latest unboxing video.
I’m happy to announce that we’ll be doing a weekly video blog that highlights features I think you should know about in Live Search; quick snippets of how-to’s that demonstrate the sometimes little known features lurking in our engine. We’ll also be talking with people within the Live Search org, from developers, UI people, PMs, and even the occasional product manager, to get inside the guts of what makes us and the Live Search engine tick. I hope you’ll find the posts useful and fun. We’ll be cross-posting to Channel9 as well (or more accurately, we’ll be cross-posting from Channel9) so no matter where you go, there we are.
Shout out with questions, people you’d like us to talk to, feature demo suggestions, and the answer behind those numbers on Lost. We’ll do our best to respond in kind!
Now on to this week’s demo: Image Search!
You may think you know Image Search, but in the next five minutes I’ll show you at least a couple of things I bet you didn’t know you could do.
Check it out!