A quick note about my upcoming keynote at the Search Engine Strategies conference, Tuesday, August 19th at 9:00 am in San Jose. Kevin Ryan and the entire SES organization put on one of the best search conferences around. This year I have the privilege to present to more than 4,000 of you down in the Valley. Our large presence around the show will let us hear from all of you about our products and services and help us better understand the...
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Microsoft is into the Olympics in a big way through our partnership with NBC on NBCOlympics.com, the official online home of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing! And Live Search is ready to help you find everything you want during the games.   Feeling competitive? We’ve made it easy for you to find out if your country is ahead or behind – just search for “Olympic medals” and you’ll get up-to-the-minute tallies...
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Today we are bringing our Webmaster Tools out of beta and releasing several new features that help webmasters see how Live Search crawls and indexes your sites. As a website owner, you can use these tools to improve your results on Live Search when a someone is looking for your site. The new Webmaster tools give you more data about referring links, identify issues Live Search encountered when crawling your site, and help you improve the overall...
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Today we’re releasing an update to the Live Search home page that received positive feedback from customers in trials last month. The new design features background images that will change frequently, augmented with what we call “hotspots.” These interactive areas highlight parts of the image and help you explore search results related to the highlighted area. Users who have tested this new home page have found it both engaging...
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We’re excited to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company. Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research. More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of...
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Now all of eBay’s “Buy it Now” offers will be eligible for cashback rewards. With eBay’s expansive catalog of products, from jewelry to electronics, you’ll start to see more cashback ads appearing in our search results. That means more ways for you to save. You’ll see three primary differences between this user experience and other cashback user experiences: There’s an eBay ad with a cashback gleam (the...
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One of the most exciting developments we’ve had in the last year was the success of our inaugural Search and Give program where your queries helped to raise more than $250,000 for local schools and non-profits. Over the course of the year the program generated cash donations for more than 20,000 organizations ranging from schools to non-profits such as Doctors Without Borders and ASPCA (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to...
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We at Live Search are pleased to announce another collaboration with Yahoo and Google aimed at making webmasters’ lives easier. Webmasters have long used the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to control how search engines access and display their content. The REP offers an easy and efficient way to communicate with search engines, and is currently used by millions of publishers worldwide. Over the past few years, we have been working with...
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Has this ever happened to you? You search online for information and click a promising link only to get an error page staring back at you: These generic 404 error pages leave you stranded, with no option but to click the back button and start over, or just give up altogether — not very helpful. We thought about this problem and realized that we had all the pieces to offer something much more useful. We could help website owners create...
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With today’s HP announcement and the recent MSN toolbar release, I want to discuss our recent moves in the toolbar space. Overall, these distribution deals come down to three things: 1. Live Search is ready for primetime These types of deals require a search engine that can stand on its own, as we all know how easy it is to switch to another search engine. Sure, Live Search has room to improve, but we’re confident that when consumers...
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