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...
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Coming soon: Windows Live Search now inside Windows Live Messenger

Very 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...
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MSDN Using MSN to Build Customer Satisfaction

On 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...
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Live for answers

We’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...
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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...
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Going Places: Accelerating Search in Academic Research

We 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...
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Live Local - What's REALLY New

The Live Local team shipped a major update this week with a bunch of new unique features. Coverage in blogs and other online sites has been really positive, but they all seem to focus on the same couple of features. We wanted to spotlight some of the other goodies that are often overlooked, while also providing tips for the big ticket features that might not be obvious. International Coverage Until now, International support in Live Local has...
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Opting Out of Open Directory Listings for Webmasters

Here in Search, we are always interested in hearing about ways to improve the search experience. And, along with Danny Sullivan and Dave Winer, customers have let us know that they wanted us to change how we used Open Directory descriptions in search results. So… we did! Just to give some background, the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org is a repository of millions of human-edited descriptions. Even though these human-edited descriptions...
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MSNBC.com News Search

On April 19th we released a new version of site search for MSNBC.com built entirely on the MSN Search platform. This is a great improvement from our previous site search solutions and one we think that people will find really useful for searching news. Take a peek at http://msnbc.msn.com and try searching for a few of the topics in the news like E3, gas prices or (my personal favorite) Britney Spears. To provide results we have taken advantage of...
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Happy Cinco de Mayo!

As you may have heard, we have been working away on a question and answer service for Windows Live Search.  Yesterday a few pages for the beta signup were posted by accident so we decided to get the word out formally and open up the beta invite page at http://ideas.live.com today. You can get a lot more detail on the QnA team blog at http://spaces.msn.com/liveqna, but here is a quick summary of why we’re so excited about this service...
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