Bing Blogs - 236

Today at the IT Forum in Barcelona, the latest version of Windows Desktop Search (WDS) and MSN Search Toolbar, both enabled for easy enterprise deployment, will say “Hola!” to the world! With this new release, enterprise IT departments can easily and securely deploy, customize and manage Windows Desktop Search across their entire PC network (both Windows XP and Widnows 2000 SP4+). Not only is WDS free to deploy with your Windows...
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Last week, we announced MSN Book Search and our joining the OCA. Yesterday, we announced a partnership with the British Library to digitize and make available via MSN Book Search, 25 million pages (roughly 100,000 books) from the British Library’s collection over the next year. This partnership with the British Library represents another step in MSN Search’s goal to provide the most relevant answers to users’ queries. Through...
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Welcome to the new Virtual Earth developer blog.  Going forward, we will strive to make this blog a good resource for news and information on developing applications powered by Virtual Earth.  Here we will be posting coding tips and tricks, pointers to new content on MSDN and community sites, and other information on building the best VE experience for your customers.  This blog is very new, and we don’t have...
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Finally, MSN Search was visited by Channel 9 – the amazing MSDN Web site that brings the people of Microsoft to you in video.  Erik Selberg and I joined Robert Scoble for a lively, hour-long discussion.  Check out the video here.   We talk about: the neural network (see June 21 post), 01:30 static versus dynamic rank (see our May 03 post), 04:00 search engine optimization, 08:20 the nature of relevance, 12:00...
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Oilman beat me to the punch posting this one. Yesterday, Yusuf Medhi, MSN SVP, asked us to invite people to join the US MSN adCenter Pilot. I am going to extend the invitation to apply to all of our loyal blog readers. We want all of you to have a shot. See below for the invite and information on how to apply.       Brady Forrest, MSN Search PM —-From: Yusuf Mehdi As you know, we launched MSN adCenter –our...
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As we release more instant answers, we get a lot of great feedback on them.  One common question, also brought up by Scoble recently (with follow up), goes something like this: “I like it when you show the stock answer for queries like msft and intc, but why doesn’t it appear for other valid tickers like play?” We could simply show the answer for all known financial symbols.  The problem is when someone searches for...
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Our friends over at www.ViaVirtualEarth.com are helping us run a contest for developers building Virtual Earth mashups.  If you have already written a cool Virtual Earth application or have a great idea for one, now is your chance to possibly turn that application into a prize of $1000.   It might be worth investigating the competition over in the VE Gallery like Poly9’s MSNBC news event map or Nikhil Kothari...
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Internet Explorer is my browser of choice and I’m eagerly looking forward to the enhancements coming in IE 7.  However, some of our customers prefer using Firefox and we respect that choice.  Some developers in our user community have created Firefox plug-ins to make it easy to do searches on MSN from the Firefox search box.  Even though it’s currently buried in Firefox under “Add Engines… Find lots of other...
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The VE team made two exciting announcements for developers at this weeks PDC – one practical, the other just pure fun. Let’s get practical out of the way first. When VE was first released in July, it was accompanied by a Javascript library that developers could use to build Virtual Earth maps into their own applications. A license restriction only allowed for the use of the library in non-commercial applications.  But now at PDC...
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Today at noon we’ll be giving a session at PDC’05 titled Tips, Tricks, & Hacks.  We’ll be talking about advanced search syntax for both web and desktop search.   For the web, I’ve prepared a hack that makes some of our advanced search syntax more accessible, specifically to developers.  The hack is a Trixie / Greasemonkey script that modifies the MSN Search interface at run time with javascript. ...
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