Do you want to see the latest aggregator from Start.com? They launched a preview of their latest aggregator last night. In addition to having a slick new look, the site has search results integration, stock and weather modules, and  a search history. The URL to the new aggregator can be found after you solve a puzzle at http://www.start.com/3 (don’t worry MSN Search’s Instant Answers are available to help). Have fun  playing...
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Dare Obasanjo has written an article about using AJAX with MSN Search RSS feeds. For the article he created a page that uses AJAX to browse a specific Space’s photos or a random Space’s photos (and written an article about it). He uses the MSN Search RSS feeds to select the random Space (using the query site:spaces.msn.com photo album).  Brady Forrest, MSN Search PM
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It now prefers to be called the “MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search”.  Respect!     Getting this release out has been a crazy 11 months for our Silicon Valley & Redmond based team.  Here is what I remember (I’ll admit some of it is a bit blurry…): 1 “lost” suitcase (recovered!) 1 baby born 2 marriages (not related to the 1 birth) 3 power outages on...
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Weblog news readers, or RSS aggregators, are an established genre of internet software and facilitate efficient consumption of the mass of content available in the xml format RSS across weblogs, news sites, and even search engines like MSN Search.   There’s a new form of aggregator cooking in a skunkworks MSN project at start.com/1.  Aggregator software has typically come in a 2×2 matrix of flavors: internet or client, start...
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Customer feedback and usability testing has told us that our nifty, innovative advanced search features are somewhat hard to discover.  For those of you who haven’t tried it, or wondered how it worked, here’s the scoop. By clicking “+Search Builder” beneath the text box, you drop down a panel with a set of advanced search features like site specific search, country and language restrictions, and lots more.  As...
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Search Champ and personal friend, Buzz Bruggeman, recently announced his company’s release of an ActiveWords agent for MSN Desktop Search!  ActiveWords is a slick application launcher – just type and it will launch apps, search, or jump to websites. Buzz and his team worked with us to get it built, and from what I hear it has been getting some major downloads!   Somewhat related, I love software –dream something up one...
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As you may have noticed elsewhere, our teammates at MSR Asia released a Search Result Clustering site & toolbar (good job guys!). It can be used for query disambiguation (example: jaguar) and sub-topic discovery (example: data mining). It was developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia and does all of the clustering on the fly using MSN’s Search Results. MSRA’s approach to clustering is a little different that other...
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We’re thrilled to announce that Dr. Gary William Flake has joined the Microsoft as a Distinguished Engineer; Dr. Flake is the first person outside the company to be hired as a distinguished engineer (DE). Dr. Flake comes from Yahoo where he led their research and development efforts, focusing on creating the next generation of Web search.  At Microsoft he’ll be responsible for bridging the innovation happening between Microsoft...
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Yesterday marks the release of Messenger 7.0 for Windows (and the official launch of Spaces). If you download the new IM client you’ll see that we’ve added 3 ways to search the web. There’s a search box on the buddy window and you can right-click on text in the conversation window, both of these allow you to pick from our verticals. The third way is a new button right under “Send” that allows you to query MSN Search. ...
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Hello World.    I’ve been quiet for some time now, and I have no good excuses with so much going on in Desktop Search Space (well there was that month in the Bahamas…I wish!).  Google went final with their Desktop Search and unveiled a nifty plug-in community space on their site.  Yahoo partnered with X1 to release a desktop search tool under their brand and recently updated it to include indexing of their IM...
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