Awards season is an exciting time, especially when it comes to the Oscars. Who will be the big winners this year? Frost/Nixon, Milk, or that movie Slumdog Millionaire that I keep hearing about? Unfortunately, here at Live Search we haven’t yet invented an algorithm that will predict the winners of the Oscars. Believe me, several of our engineers would love to work on a project like that. But what we can do is make sure that you have instant...
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Stefan here – long time reader, first time poster. I’m one of the new folks on the Live Search team that Betsy has told you about, and you’ll be seeing more from me in the next few months. Seeing is the operative word in that sentence because the Live Search blog is getting some extreme-video-love courtesy of myself and the good folks at Channel9. Video, you ask? Everyone knows video viewership on the web is going nowhere…...
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Subaru Canada just launched their new dealer locator and it’s pretty great white north! The new dealer locator features a Microsoft Virtual Earth map sporting a grey and blue theme with Subaru branded icons for highlighting their dealerships. Check out the slick navigation bar, eh? 
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We get asked it a lot. “How do I get more coverage for my site?” Over the past couple of weeks on the Webmaster Center blog, we have been sharing strategies for large sites to help them optimize their sites for search. The series, called “Optimizing your very large site for search,” covered four important areas we believe a large site should look at to improve its relevance and coverage: Part 1 We started by focusing on...
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One of the most common challenges search engines run into when indexing a website is identifying and consolidating duplicate pages. Duplicates can occur when any given webpage has multiple URLs that point to it. For example: URL Description http://mysite.com A webmaster may consider this their authoritative or canonical URL for their homepage. http://www.mysite.com However, you can add ‘www’ to most websites and still get the...
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Everyone knows great content is fundamental to the success of your site. It is the reason people are looking for your site and it is why they will stay. In the previous three posts from this series, we have discussed how large sites need to expose fewer URLs, how you can help search engines crawl more efficiently, and how not to unintentionally hide your content from crawlers.
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This week at SMX West you can see members of the Live Search team speaking on a range of search topics. I’ll be there as part of a panel on search user behavior called “Just Behave – A Look at Searcher Behavior”, at 3pm on Wednesday the 11th. It should be a fun session, with some great people from Yahoo, Comscore, and Enquiro. My primary job at Live Search is Group Program Manager for Search Relevance – making sure...
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We want to do a quick shout-out post to all of you — some new additions to the Live Search outreach squad and another way to virtually join us at Search Marketing Expo West (SMX) this week! First off, let’s reintroduce the existing members of the team… If you’ve been to any developer-oriented Search conference, you’ve likely run into the highly youthful looking Nathan Buggia (who’s speaking at SMX) and Jeremiah...
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Going to California holds a special meaning for those of us up in Vitamin D Deficiency, USA (a.k.a., Seattle). So it’s with double-the-pleasure giddiness that we attend SMX West this year. (Talk about search and catch rays on the side? Dude. We’re there.) Invited by the leading search minds of Danny Sullivan and company, Live Search will have the pleasure of participating in a number of panels, covering such topics as tips on building...
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February is upon us, and for many of us snow addicts, this is one of the most exciting times of the year. And what great luck we have this year! From the Pacific Northwest to Colorado to the Northeast, snow is dumping from above. While others are out ripping up the fresh powder, we’ve been working on ways to make it easier to find the snow. Our snow “instant answer” shows you a quick overview of ski conditions at a given resort....
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