We want to take a moment and congratulate a teammate of ours. This past Tuesday, Ramez Naam, the GPM of our algorithmic results, officially became a published author (and blogger). His book, “More than Human“, discusses both the promises & pitfalls that bio-enhancing technology hold for our world. In his own words: I wrote this book to cover these two, interrelated topics: 1) The science of human enhancement – what’s...
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Our MSN Search Party at SES turned out to be a big success, with the entrance continually packed with over 400 people attending the event.  The event took up four rooms of a great restaurant in New York called The Park.  The party was conversation filled and entertaining, with people mingling from the first floor to the second eating, talking and drinking. Thanks for coming! Kristine Bangert, MSN Marketing  
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So, we’ve been reading some interesting posts lately about MSN Found. It seems that people are taking us a bit too seriously and have a not-so-accurate perception about what it’s really about. The campaign is simply meant to be an alternative way to entertain people and let them know about MSN Search. The pages aren’t supposed to be “blogs” but are character pages – this is a fictional search “opera,&rdquo...
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In the initial MSN Search Beta release we introduced a feature called Encarta Answers. This provides direct answers to all sorts of questions related to geographical locations, historical figures, definitions, calculations, conversions, and simple equations.  Encarta Answers show the exact answer to your question or query right at the top of the MSN Search results pages. Here are just a few examples of things you can do with Encarta...
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As some of you may have noticed, MSN Newsbot, our personalized news aggregator, has undergone some changes as a part of the MSN Search launch.  The UI is now integrated with the search product.  In the US this means moving easily between Newsbot Search and our partner MSNBC.  For all our international markets Newsbot is wholly integrated into Search. Our layout now features more top stories (4) at the top of the page plus image...
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I am proud and excited to announce that MSN Search is now officially launched. With this final push we have made more than 40,000 Encarta encyclopedia articles and associated media available for free to MSN Search users, which translates to more than 1.5 million Instant Answers. We also improved and integrated Newsbot, added a button for RSS feeds on the bottom of all applicable search results pages, and increased our MSN Music selection. We...
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We have posted a new version (02.00.0001.1203) of the Toolbar Suite for download.  Some of the fixes and enhancements in the latest version include:   Eliminated the virus pop ups and increased performance (more below) Ability to index Outlook items when it isn’t your default email client Clear Deskbar text after performing searches Fixed a majority of reported Watson bugs Several bug fixes to improve overall...
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While the My MSN content directoryhas an amazing diversity of RSS providers, we don’t yet have easy integration with Search RSS feeds.  It’s coming, but in the meantime, we’ve created some bookmarklets to easily subscribe to your favorite search terms at My MSN. To subscribe to a search right now, you can just click the links below.  To save, and add new searches as you need them, just copy the bookmarklets to your...
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The MSN Portal team had a “little” launch early last week; they added the ability to read RSS (and Atom) feeds on your My MSN page. Users can add an individual blog’s feed or an rss search feed or an MSN Search Results feed.  They also launched a site for listing all of the available MSN RSS feeds – right now, there are feeds for MSN Music, MSN Autos and MSNBC with more to come.Feel free to add the MSN Search Blog to...
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Our job is to provide the most relevant and useful results to a user’s search query. Sounds easy.  But, unfortunately there’s a powerful financial incentive for a small subset of people to try to manipulate the results so their sites come up to the top – at the expense of our customers. Fighting this web spam is one of the harder parts of our job.  Spammers are very creative people who evolve their techniques over time....
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