A few days ago, Mike Liebhold on Geowanking expressed concern over privacy of personal information in the context of the “Locate Me” feature in Windows Live Local. This has been discussed further on BoingBoing and O’Reilly’s Radar; so we thought of adding some clarity on what goes on behind the scenes in this application and with your information.
When you visit the Windows Live Local and hit “Locate Me”...
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Bing Blogs - 256

Everything old is new again! You can now reference "Virtual Earth" for your Bing Maps v8 Web Applications if you are looking to go "Cookie-less"
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When we launched the initial beta of Virtual Earth in the summer, we talked about how we are set to create an immersive experience in local search and mapping. During the last couple of months, we got great deal of feedback from you suggesting new features and sending us bugs – so thank you for your support! Now, we are back with new and exciting features (and don’t just take our word for it, both Michael Arrington and Charlene Li have...
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The Virtual Earth Standard Control SDK is avilable at: http://local.live.com The reviews so far have been great, and it is excellent to see such a positive response from our customers. It was from all of your excellent feedback from the first beta that we were able to build this next version. Thank you!
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Danny is holding the last Search Engine Strategies conference of the year in Chicago this week. We’ll be there to answer questions and discuss our products. You can see some of my teammates at the following talks:
Tuesday, December 6th (today!)4:30 PM: the Search Ad Vendors – Doug Stotland, Group Product Manager
Wednesday, December 7th2:00pm – 3:30pm: Search Engine Q&A on Links – Ramez Naam, Group Program Manager,...
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Over the next two weeks MSN will be offering developer webcasts on MSDN. These will be hands-on classes taught by the developers and PMs who built our APIs. Here’s the schedule:
MSDN Webcast: The MSN Search Toolbar: Building Windows Desktop Search into Your Applications (Level 200)Monday, December 5, 20051:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time
MSDN Webcast: Extending Start.com Using Startlets (Level 200)Wednesday, December 7, 20051:00 P.M...
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Around this time of year, we see a big jump in the number of shopping related searches. More and more people are using a web search engine to kick off the shopping process, and we are always trying to improve the experience. To help you find what you’re looking for faster, we recently introduced v1 of our Shopping Instant Answer. This is perfect for those of you that shop in your undies (you know who you are).
We...
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A little over a year ago we began inviting groups of academics, bloggers, siteowners, and technologists out to Redmond to talk about search. We call them Search Champs. We usually select this group based on who we are reading and we think would provide us great insight. We spend a couple of days with the group showing them our future plans, getting their input and making connections. Every time we hold these sessions we inevitably hear from...
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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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