Last week, we announced MSN Book Search and our joining the OCA. Yesterday, we announced a partnership with the British Library to digitize and make available via MSN Book Search, 25 million pages (roughly 100,000 books) from the British Library’s collection over the next year. This partnership with the British Library represents another step in MSN Search’s goal to provide the most relevant answers to users’ queries. Through...
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Finally, MSN Search was visited by Channel 9 – the amazing MSDN Web site that brings the people of Microsoft to you in video.  Erik Selberg and I joined Robert Scoble for a lively, hour-long discussion.  Check out the video here.   We talk about: the neural network (see June 21 post), 01:30 static versus dynamic rank (see our May 03 post), 04:00 search engine optimization, 08:20 the nature of relevance, 12:00...
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Oilman beat me to the punch posting this one. Yesterday, Yusuf Medhi, MSN SVP, asked us to invite people to join the US MSN adCenter Pilot. I am going to extend the invitation to apply to all of our loyal blog readers. We want all of you to have a shot. See below for the invite and information on how to apply.       Brady Forrest, MSN Search PM —-From: Yusuf Mehdi As you know, we launched MSN adCenter –our...
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As we release more instant answers, we get a lot of great feedback on them.  One common question, also brought up by Scoble recently (with follow up), goes something like this: “I like it when you show the stock answer for queries like msft and intc, but why doesn’t it appear for other valid tickers like play?” We could simply show the answer for all known financial symbols.  The problem is when someone searches for...
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Our friends over at www.ViaVirtualEarth.com are helping us run a contest for developers building Virtual Earth mashups.  If you have already written a cool Virtual Earth application or have a great idea for one, now is your chance to possibly turn that application into a prize of $1000.   It might be worth investigating the competition over in the VE Gallery like Poly9’s MSNBC news event map or Nikhil Kothari...
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Internet Explorer is my browser of choice and I’m eagerly looking forward to the enhancements coming in IE 7.  However, some of our customers prefer using Firefox and we respect that choice.  Some developers in our user community have created Firefox plug-ins to make it easy to do searches on MSN from the Firefox search box.  Even though it’s currently buried in Firefox under “Add Engines… Find lots of other...
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The VE team made two exciting announcements for developers at this weeks PDC – one practical, the other just pure fun. Let’s get practical out of the way first. When VE was first released in July, it was accompanied by a Javascript library that developers could use to build Virtual Earth maps into their own applications. A license restriction only allowed for the use of the library in non-commercial applications.  But now at PDC...
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Today at noon we’ll be giving a session at PDC’05 titled Tips, Tricks, & Hacks.  We’ll be talking about advanced search syntax for both web and desktop search.   For the web, I’ve prepared a hack that makes some of our advanced search syntax more accessible, specifically to developers.  The hack is a Trixie / Greasemonkey script that modifies the MSN Search interface at run time with javascript. ...
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For all you developers out there, you’ll be happy to know that you can now build applications that leverage the power of MSN Search through our new MSN Search Web Service.  Our new SOAP Web Service offers an enormous 10,000 queries per application per day, and because the MSN Search Web Service automatically allocates a separate quota to each IP address, users of your application don’t need to sign up for anything for your app to...
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There have been hints for a while that we were going to be releasing an API for Search this year, but we had hoped that it would stay quiet for just one more week. It didn’t and there is no reason to cry over spilt milk. The API itself will be released next week, but you can read about it now.  The article is light on details, but we will provide more next week. Chandu Thota posted about the Virtual Earth APIs and did not skimp...
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