Wow! Virtual Earth (beta) has been released. It’s a beautiful web-site that’s packed full of features including local search, maps, and a scratchpad. I love that I can easily create a tour of seattle; here’s some spots on my personal map of capitol hill. We’re not the only one’s reporting on Virtual Earth’s release, both Search Engine Watch and Chandu Thota have more. I’ve taken the liberty of reposting...
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We find customer feedback quite delicious at MSN Search.  To help the team digest the massive flow of feedback we receive, we designed a tagging and viewing system inspired by the faceted browsing system, Flamenco, developed at UC Berkeley. We’re very happy to have addressed our top feature request in the latest release – yellow page results, called out in the image below as “ypResults” with the introduction of local...
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We received a couple of comments in response to the recent blog posting which announced the availability of international versions of MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search. Specifically, we were asked “where’s the India version”, and “where’s the China version”. I’d love to say that we took those comments to heart and rushed to prepare new international versions for you, but the truth of the...
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Hello everyone!  This is my first blog entry after joining the team a few months ago.  Like everyone else I have caught the excitement in the work we are doing on MSN Search Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search.  Apparently, it is something that continues to permeate these hallways…  After reviewing the great feedback from partners and customers using our Windows Desktop Search add-ins (RSS feed) we are...
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With all the attention the recent MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search product has been getting, the team has been hard at work extending and improving the product for an international audience. On June 23rd, we released version 02.05.0000.1082 to the web for eleven markets, including a revision of the United States (English) highlight of this international rollout was a launch of the Japanese versions of both our Web...
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As we mentioned earlier, in the latest version of MSN Search we’ve added a number of new advanced query operators. These make it easier to find things using MSN Search, and in some cases capture some of the zeitgeist of the Internet. Filetype: One of the most requests operators was filetype:, which enables you to filter documents based on their particular filetype. Currently, MSN Search supports html, txt, and pdf, as well as the primary...
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When we rolled out instant answers for the NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament, we got a ton of great feedback.  By far, your most common request was for more sports. In light of this, we just released instant answers for professional baseball!  We teamed up with FOX Sports to bring you four different kinds of answers for the majors: League – query for baseball to get the latest real-time scores and schedules...
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We launched our MSN Search engine on February 1st and have remained hard at work to make it better every day.  Yesterday, we released some improvements we hope you’ll like.  Much of this work is targeted directly at feedback that our blog readers and other customers have given us, so please keep the comments coming!  We have a long way to go to achieve our vision of the perfect search engine – and we can&rsquo...
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We would like to thank everyone for giving our tabbed browsing implementation a try and submitting your feedback. We are actively listening and working on improving the feature! Our goal in delivering this feature was to give IE users a tabbed browsing solution to enhance overall online search and browse experiences prior to the official release of IE7 without them having to install a completely new browser. Many of you have reported a flicker...
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You asked for it, we told you it was coming and now it’s here! Happy to let you know Tabs are now available as part of the MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search. Why are tabs so great? Well here is a personal example: I am addicted to online shopping. Yet I don’t have the time to constantly monitor the shopping sites I love for great deals and new items.  The new Tabbed Browsing feature in MSN Search Toolbar lets me set a...
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