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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As you may have noticed elsewhere, our teammates at MSR Asia released a Search Result Clustering site & toolbar (good job guys!). It can be used for query disambiguation (example: jaguar) and sub-topic discovery (example: data mining). It was developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia and does all of the clustering on the fly using MSN’s Search Results. MSRA’s approach to clustering is a little different that other...
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We’re thrilled to announce that Dr. Gary William Flake has joined the Microsoft as a Distinguished Engineer; Dr. Flake is the first person outside the company to be hired as a distinguished engineer (DE). Dr. Flake comes from Yahoo where he led their research and development efforts, focusing on creating the next generation of Web search.  At Microsoft he’ll be responsible for bridging the innovation happening between Microsoft...
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Yesterday marks the release of Messenger 7.0 for Windows (and the official launch of Spaces). If you download the new IM client you’ll see that we’ve added 3 ways to search the web. There’s a search box on the buddy window and you can right-click on text in the conversation window, both of these allow you to pick from our verticals. The third way is a new button right under “Send” that allows you to query MSN Search. ...
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Hello World.    I’ve been quiet for some time now, and I have no good excuses with so much going on in Desktop Search Space (well there was that month in the Bahamas…I wish!).  Google went final with their Desktop Search and unveiled a nifty plug-in community space on their site.  Yahoo partnered with X1 to release a desktop search tool under their brand and recently updated it to include indexing of their IM...
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We’re always looking for ways to give you search results faster.  The popular Desktop Search Shortcuts from MSN Desktop Search are good examples of this.  On a related note, Internet Explorer (5.0 and above) has a little known feature that lets you quickly search for something on any site: IE Search prefixes. After the search prefixes are set up, you can type a single word identifier (prefix) and search query in the IE address bar...
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When I was at etech last week checking out all the wonderful things that people are building on the web and with machines I had a number of people ask me about our RSS feeds and what was permissible. As we said in a previous post they are for end-user, non-commercial applications; we released them so that people can track MSN searches via their personal RSS readers. Very specifically not for recreating our search engine on your own website. A...
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During this period of madness, we have a special treat for all you college basketball fanatics. We rolled out some instant answers for the NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament.   We teamed up with FOX Sports to show real-time scores and schedules during the games. You get a quick snapshot of the tournament just by searching for “college hoops”. You can also track a specific team such as “niagara purple...
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In October 2004, about 30 technology enthusiasts from around the world came to our Redmond campus to take part in an early preview of the new MSN Search service and assist us in the development process. The Champs reviewed our product plans from the bottoms up, including the current and upcoming features as well as future ideas that hadn’t made it into our first version release. Our goal was to get constructive feedback and to obtain a view...
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