We launched Virtual Earth Beta a week ago yesterday, and the response has been overwhelming to say the least. We’ve received a ton of feedback and suggestions from users via email, reviews, and blogs (Check out Jeremy Wright’s review, Austin Pauls’ comments, Search Engine Watch, or this fun thread at /. for a sampling) Work is well underway on the next release of Virtual Earth and your feedback is super important to insure it...
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We launched a beta version of the MSN Screen Saver (you can find it at http://screensaver.msn.com) last week. It was built by a few people in our London team. There wasn’t really a business model behind this; someone had the idea to build this because it would be “cool for users” and so we let them go and build it. So what’s the big deal about a screen saver? Well, it displays personalized content (news, weather, pictures...
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Wow! Virtual Earth (beta) has been released. It’s a beautiful web-site that’s packed full of features including local search, maps, and a scratchpad. I love that I can easily create a tour of seattle; here’s some spots on my personal map of capitol hill. We’re not the only one’s reporting on Virtual Earth’s release, both Search Engine Watch and Chandu Thota have more. I’ve taken the liberty of reposting...
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We find customer feedback quite delicious at MSN Search.  To help the team digest the massive flow of feedback we receive, we designed a tagging and viewing system inspired by the faceted browsing system, Flamenco, developed at UC Berkeley. We’re very happy to have addressed our top feature request in the latest release – yellow page results, called out in the image below as “ypResults” with the introduction of local...
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We received a couple of comments in response to the recent blog posting which announced the availability of international versions of MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search. Specifically, we were asked “where’s the India version”, and “where’s the China version”. I’d love to say that we took those comments to heart and rushed to prepare new international versions for you, but the truth of the...
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Hello everyone!  This is my first blog entry after joining the team a few months ago.  Like everyone else I have caught the excitement in the work we are doing on MSN Search Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search.  Apparently, it is something that continues to permeate these hallways…  After reviewing the great feedback from partners and customers using our Windows Desktop Search add-ins (RSS feed) we are...
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With all the attention the recent MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search product has been getting, the team has been hard at work extending and improving the product for an international audience. On June 23rd, we released version 02.05.0000.1082 to the web for eleven markets, including a revision of the United States (English) highlight of this international rollout was a launch of the Japanese versions of both our Web...
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As we mentioned earlier, in the latest version of MSN Search we’ve added a number of new advanced query operators. These make it easier to find things using MSN Search, and in some cases capture some of the zeitgeist of the Internet. Filetype: One of the most requests operators was filetype:, which enables you to filter documents based on their particular filetype. Currently, MSN Search supports html, txt, and pdf, as well as the primary...
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When we rolled out instant answers for the NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament, we got a ton of great feedback.  By far, your most common request was for more sports. In light of this, we just released instant answers for professional baseball!  We teamed up with FOX Sports to bring you four different kinds of answers for the majors: League – query for baseball to get the latest real-time scores and schedules...
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We launched our MSN Search engine on February 1st and have remained hard at work to make it better every day.  Yesterday, we released some improvements we hope you’ll like.  Much of this work is targeted directly at feedback that our blog readers and other customers have given us, so please keep the comments coming!  We have a long way to go to achieve our vision of the perfect search engine – and we can&rsquo...
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