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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We would like to thank everyone for giving our tabbed browsing implementation a try and submitting your feedback. We are actively listening and working on improving the feature! Our goal in delivering this feature was to give IE users a tabbed browsing solution to enhance overall online search and browse experiences prior to the official release of IE7 without them having to install a completely new browser. Many of you have reported a flicker...
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You asked for it, we told you it was coming and now it’s here! Happy to let you know Tabs are now available as part of the MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search. Why are tabs so great? Well here is a personal example: I am addicted to online shopping. Yet I don’t have the time to constantly monitor the shopping sites I love for great deals and new items.  The new Tabbed Browsing feature in MSN Search Toolbar lets me set a...
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Do you want to see the latest aggregator from Start.com? They launched a preview of their latest aggregator last night. In addition to having a slick new look, the site has search results integration, stock and weather modules, and  a search history. The URL to the new aggregator can be found after you solve a puzzle at http://www.start.com/3 (don’t worry MSN Search’s Instant Answers are available to help). Have fun  playing...
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Dare Obasanjo has written an article about using AJAX with MSN Search RSS feeds. For the article he created a page that uses AJAX to browse a specific Space’s photos or a random Space’s photos (and written an article about it). He uses the MSN Search RSS feeds to select the random Space (using the query site:spaces.msn.com photo album).  Brady Forrest, MSN Search PM
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It now prefers to be called the “MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search”.  Respect!     Getting this release out has been a crazy 11 months for our Silicon Valley & Redmond based team.  Here is what I remember (I’ll admit some of it is a bit blurry…): 1 “lost” suitcase (recovered!) 1 baby born 2 marriages (not related to the 1 birth) 3 power outages on...
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Weblog news readers, or RSS aggregators, are an established genre of internet software and facilitate efficient consumption of the mass of content available in the xml format RSS across weblogs, news sites, and even search engines like MSN Search.   There’s a new form of aggregator cooking in a skunkworks MSN project at start.com/1.  Aggregator software has typically come in a 2×2 matrix of flavors: internet or client, start...
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Customer feedback and usability testing has told us that our nifty, innovative advanced search features are somewhat hard to discover.  For those of you who haven’t tried it, or wondered how it worked, here’s the scoop. By clicking “+Search Builder” beneath the text box, you drop down a panel with a set of advanced search features like site specific search, country and language restrictions, and lots more.  As...
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Search Champ and personal friend, Buzz Bruggeman, recently announced his company’s release of an ActiveWords agent for MSN Desktop Search!  ActiveWords is a slick application launcher – just type and it will launch apps, search, or jump to websites. Buzz and his team worked with us to get it built, and from what I hear it has been getting some major downloads!   Somewhat related, I love software –dream something up one...
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