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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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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