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 worked closely with MSN Shopping to display the few most popular products for common shopping queries.  The links in the answer give you a lot more product information to help your research.  In this version of the answer, we trigger on category (e.g. computer keyboards) and brand + category (e.g. canon digital cameras) queries.  The MSN Shopping blog has additional info.  We’re going to add support for more types of shopping queries over time and tweak ones we show based on your feedback.

Please check it out and send any comments you have.  If you have specific ideas on how to make it easier to research, compare or buy online products starting from MSN Search, let us know.  We read every piece of Instant Answer feedback that comes into our system and your input is very important to help us improve.

Thanks,

Jamie Buckley and the Instant Answers team