Blogs

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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We’ve gotten reports via email, newsgroups and in our comments about folks getting anti-virus notifications while running MSN Desktop Search.  This is caused because we write email & attachments to a temporary directory during the indexing process.  There isn’t a security or virus threat since after we are done indexing the item we delete it, but anti-virus apps notice the temp files and throw a warning notification. ...
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We’ve been experimenting with RSS Search results on our live servers and we’ve been found out by Greg Linden, Gary Price & many others.  Good job guys! This is an experimental alpha feature that is still under development. Since this is an experiment, be aware that we will be changing it and making it better. We are planning to keep the feeds up during the experiment, but will not if they are abused.  Use them from your...
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As you know we have been testing the beta of our new search service on an opt-in basis for several months now.  From time to time we also route some of the customers from our live search service at search.msn.com through the Beta web site in order to do scalability testing.  Next week we intend to begin turning up the dial and direct more of our users to the Beta. You’ll continue to see us doing this on occasion for the forseeable...
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We’ve packed our bags and sunglasses for the annual CES conference in Vegas.  Stop by to visit, ask a question, or see us demo MSN Web Search and the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta with Desktop Search at the Microsoft booth (7145). There will also be folks from MSN Messenger, TV and Entertainment teams demonstrating their latest and greatest!   – Heather Gordon, Product Planner
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We started the blog to be able to talk to you, our users, and it has been a great success. We have decided to create the MSN Search wiki to add a way for you to talk to us (in addition to your blogs, Webmaster World & our Newsgroup). We will be paying attention find out what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong. Tell us! The MSN Search wiki is a part of Channel9 so you will need a log-in to edit it (anyone can read it).  Special...
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Pablo has cooked up a shiny new site to share, try out, and submit deskbar shortcuts to!  Most impressive is the desktop shortcut to submit a desktop shortcut.  Assuming that you have the deskbar, create this shortcut @ds,http://www.deskbarshortcuts.com/index.php?q=$w and then you can submit shortcuts from your deskbar like in these examples: ds @a9,http://a9.com/$s or ds a9=http://a9.com/$s Go check out http://www.deskbarshortcuts...
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Monday was incredible! We are very excited about all of the feedback we received from you blog posts, comments, discussion groups, and through online feedback via our website.  Scoble posted two solid round ups of the word on the street. Thanks to everyone who has already given the beta a spin.    We are still going through everyone’s reactions on the release, but we wanted to address some of the top issues that have come...
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If you’re at SES, please join us tonight (Wednesday December 15th) for cocktails and food from 5:30pm-9:00pm.   Come by the MSN Search booth for party information and directions.  (For those who need transportation, it will provided from the Hyatt Regency McCormick place, please meet in the lobby at 4:45pm). — Brady Forrest, PM
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Today we officially announced the Beta release of MSN Toolbar Suite with Desktop Search.  We are excited to hear what you think and to see how Desktop Search gets used.  Check it out at http://beta.toolbar.msn.com when you have a chance and send us feedback!   With Desktop Search you can quickly find files, emails or pictures on your computer.  We hope you find it’s not just a fast way to search, it’s a better way...
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