Several new enhancements of note from the Search team: Tomorrow we’re releasing the beta version of Live Search Books (http://books.live.com). Check out the user experience: very clean! With this initial release we’ve focused on making the reading experience as natural as possible.
The U.S. beta launch of Live Search Books is a big step forward in advancing the way people discover information through the integration of content that...
Read More
Bing Search Blog - Page 133
What’s on your wish list this holiday season? Wish you could find the closest toy store when you’re on the go? The nearest coffee shop on a cold winter day? Get news reports or traffic information on the move? Windows Live has granted those wishes and more: we’re proud to announce three new ways to search on the go:
Mobile Software – Download an application to your phone for local search, maps, driving directions, and...
Read More
There are plenty of bots out there and, as a result, some conventions have arisen. Well-behaved bots identify themselves with a unique user-agent. They also follow the robots.txt conventions, which allow webmasters to control how their sites are crawled.
Here at Live Search, our crawlers are identified by the user-agent ‘MSNBot’. This may seem a little non-intuitive, but many webmasters depend on this, and...
Read More
What if mapping the world was more like a video game?
What if you could fly like Superman and figure out where to meet your friends for a good meal and which routes to avoid to beat traffic?
With Live Search maps you can find yellow pages and white pages information, get live traffic conditions and view stunning 3D and Birds Eye …just as if you were gaming in Second Life, but with real-world information embedded in real...
Read More
Today, we are excited to announce that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are coming together in support of the SiteMaps protocol. The goal of this effort is to improve search results for customers around the world. This protocol enables site owners everywhere to tell search engines about the content on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawl algorithms to find it.
So, why are we excited to work on this? Because by...
Read More
So, now that you’ve (a) provisioned a Live Search Box for your site, and (b) updated it with a cool look and feel, you are finally ready to build the search query of your dreams.
Back in the old days, search boxes generally gave you two options: (1) search the whole Web or (2) search only your site. With the advanced query parameters of Live Search, you now have complete control to search the subset of the Web you define, and get the results...
Read More
We’ve just posted an article on dev.live.com that looks at a few simple hacks you can do with the Live Search Box, to change its look and feel. You can use these hacks to make the search box fit better into the design of your site. List of hacks:
Applying the Windows Live styling to the basic search box
Adding default text to the search box
Auto-selecting the search box when the page loads
Ensuring compatibility with ActiveX and other smart...
Read More
(And, yes, it supports Firefox too!)
Today, we’re proud to announce the launch of the Live Search Box, to bring the power of search to your Web site or blog through a cool widget. Check it out:
When the user enters a query, the search box dynamically builds a floating <DIV> on your page to display the search results. You can customize the query in the first tab to search your site, your macro or anything else, while the second tab...
Read More
We are excited to announce that Cornell University has joined our Book Search initiative. Like all of our library scanning partnerships, the Cornell project will focus on scanning books in the public domain. Cornell and Microsoft will be teaming with Kirtas Technologies in Victor, NY to digitize the books. Kirtas uses non-destructive scanning—an obvious must for library collections!
Cornell has an impressive collection that will...
Read More
Now that Zach’s given you the user-friendly introduction to how macros work, let me take you on a tour of the gears and inner workings that we expose in our advanced syntax. These operators allow you to do some really interesting things with macros. A New Operator We have one new, very exciting operator: LinkFromDomain. Using LinkFromDomain in your search includes all sites that are linked from a given domain. This complements LinkDomain...
Read More