We have posted a new version (02.00.0001.1203) of the Toolbar Suite for download.  Some of the fixes and enhancements in the latest version include:   Eliminated the virus pop ups and increased performance (more below) Ability to index Outlook items when it isn’t your default email client Clear Deskbar text after performing searches Fixed a majority of reported Watson bugs Several bug fixes to improve overall...
Read More

While the My MSN content directoryhas an amazing diversity of RSS providers, we don’t yet have easy integration with Search RSS feeds.  It’s coming, but in the meantime, we’ve created some bookmarklets to easily subscribe to your favorite search terms at My MSN. To subscribe to a search right now, you can just click the links below.  To save, and add new searches as you need them, just copy the bookmarklets to your...
Read More

The MSN Portal team had a “little” launch early last week; they added the ability to read RSS (and Atom) feeds on your My MSN page. Users can add an individual blog’s feed or an rss search feed or an MSN Search Results feed.  They also launched a site for listing all of the available MSN RSS feeds – right now, there are feeds for MSN Music, MSN Autos and MSNBC with more to come.Feel free to add the MSN Search Blog to...
Read More

Our job is to provide the most relevant and useful results to a user’s search query. Sounds easy.  But, unfortunately there’s a powerful financial incentive for a small subset of people to try to manipulate the results so their sites come up to the top – at the expense of our customers. Fighting this web spam is one of the harder parts of our job.  Spammers are very creative people who evolve their techniques over time....
Read More

We’ve gotten reports via email, newsgroups and in our comments about folks getting anti-virus notifications while running MSN Desktop Search.  This is caused because we write email & attachments to a temporary directory during the indexing process.  There isn’t a security or virus threat since after we are done indexing the item we delete it, but anti-virus apps notice the temp files and throw a warning notification. ...
Read More

We’ve been experimenting with RSS Search results on our live servers and we’ve been found out by Greg Linden, Gary Price & many others.  Good job guys! This is an experimental alpha feature that is still under development. Since this is an experiment, be aware that we will be changing it and making it better. We are planning to keep the feeds up during the experiment, but will not if they are abused.  Use them from your...
Read More

As you know we have been testing the beta of our new search service on an opt-in basis for several months now.  From time to time we also route some of the customers from our live search service at search.msn.com through the Beta web site in order to do scalability testing.  Next week we intend to begin turning up the dial and direct more of our users to the Beta. You’ll continue to see us doing this on occasion for the forseeable...
Read More

We’ve packed our bags and sunglasses for the annual CES conference in Vegas.  Stop by to visit, ask a question, or see us demo MSN Web Search and the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta with Desktop Search at the Microsoft booth (7145). There will also be folks from MSN Messenger, TV and Entertainment teams demonstrating their latest and greatest!   – Heather Gordon, Product Planner
Read More

We started the blog to be able to talk to you, our users, and it has been a great success. We have decided to create the MSN Search wiki to add a way for you to talk to us (in addition to your blogs, Webmaster World & our Newsgroup). We will be paying attention find out what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong. Tell us! The MSN Search wiki is a part of Channel9 so you will need a log-in to edit it (anyone can read it).  Special...
Read More

Pablo has cooked up a shiny new site to share, try out, and submit deskbar shortcuts to!  Most impressive is the desktop shortcut to submit a desktop shortcut.  Assuming that you have the deskbar, create this shortcut @ds,http://www.deskbarshortcuts.com/index.php?q=$w and then you can submit shortcuts from your deskbar like in these examples: ds @a9,http://a9.com/$s or ds a9=http://a9.com/$s Go check out http://www.deskbarshortcuts...
Read More