I feel like I’m always expecting packages.  In fact, I have been receiving a steady stream of packages for the last five months because my husband and I are remodeling our 1930 house we recently purchased. At first it was fun, kind of like having a birthday everyday — but then it got challenging to keep track of everything that we had ordered.  Using the package tracking features on the various shipping companies&rsquo...
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  My name is Beau Hollis.  I’m a grad student at the University of Florida, and as of today, I’m 23 years old.  I’m a Program Manager Intern for Windows Live Search.  I help define the user experience for the Windows Live Search page.  I really love my job and my team, and of course, all the great friends I have made out here.  Speaking of my friends, they all collaborated to create the ultimate...
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Betsynote: As I type this in for Jamie, it is hot. Darn hot. Too sunny-must-go-kayak-on-the-lake-hot….This is not the Seattle I know! ———————————————————————– Around this time of year, a lot of us here in Redmond like to spend our spare time outside.  Summers are beautiful in Washington State...
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When we launched our search engine for the first time in 2005, we knew we’d be doing a bunch of catch-up. One thing customers really wanted from us that Google and Yahoo! had was HTTPS search – that is, the ability to expose non-secure areas of Web sites which were largely secure.  FirstGov.gov and sicher-im-netz.de (a campaign for secure internet usage in Germany) lead the way in requesting this feature. Once we had the...
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Another residential real estate broker has launched a new VE powered site. Coldwell Banker Bain, a popular North West realtor, has launched an interactive home search which you can find linked from their home page. It looks like the real estate bar has been raised with large numbers of commercial and residential real estate providers moving to Virtual Earth, including: Zillow, Fidelity’s FNIS, John L Scott, RE3W, LoopNet, MRIS, and many...
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Very soon, we will release a feature of Windows Live Search built into Windows Live Messenger that we think will help you while chatting with your friends. Tell us what you think! You can try this new Search feature from the activities menu of conversation window, it includes our three most popular scoped search features – Web, News and Images. These scoped results are based on Windows Live Search, so you get the same results as if you...
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On April 18th, MSDN launched site-wide its first effort in improving the customer search experience by building a targeted UI that is powered by the MSN SOAP API.  This allowed us to offer our customers the following benefits: ·         Improved Performance ·         Content Relevance – Benefit from ever-improving MSN Search...
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We’re getting a ton of great feedback on Windows Live Search.  One of the most common requests is to build the instant answers already available on MSN Search.  We hear you and are working hard to get them all in.  In fact, we just recently launched our first batch – instant answers for news and local!   The news instant answer will appear on searches for topical news stories.  Keywords are identified...
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(Betsynote:Yes, I know it’s a mouthful of a label! But it’s pretty cool!) Our friends over on the Mail Desktop team have been experimenting with ways to bring search right into a user’s inbox experience. Imagine you’ve received an email about the Arlo Guthrie show coming up later this summer…Live Mail Desktop’s Active Search would present search results about this show, as well as sponsored links offering...
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We on the Search team want to congratulate the 12 winners of the Microsoft Live Labs “Accelerating Search in Academic Research” Awards. Researchers from 36 countries submitted proposals for research to advance the field of search.  The 12 winners will receive grant money from Microsoft Live Labs and access to a set of MSN Search query logs in order to push forward our understanding of the Internet, search, and online social...
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