Search is a Love Problem

I first had the idea for this post a few years ago, when Google’s April Fool’s Day prank was to define love as a search problem and talked about how Google Romance was going to find you the person of your dreams.   We wish! (Although, at one time it DID work for Rory). But anyway, it got me thinking about Search and Community, and now that I’ve been on the Live Search team for a year I have more I can say.   So...
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Live Product Search: More Images, More Relevant

The team just released changes to Live Product Search that boost customer-perceived relevance by increasing the number of query results with images.  The table below summarizes the improvement.  Why aren’t there 100% images in the top results?  The reason is largely because many sites, including very reputable merchants like Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, and AceHardwareSuperStore.com, block image crawling bots or seriously...
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Discovering Sitemaps

When we first teamed up with Google and Yahoo to support sitemaps as an industry standard, it was with the express intention of driving the protocol forward.  Making it into a simple, effective way to tell all search engines about the structure of your site.   Today, I’m happy to announce the latest addition to the protocol: Sitemap Autodiscovery.  Autodiscovery gives siteowners the ability to easily share their sitemaps...
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Live Search Maps Update - 3D maps for Firefox, RSS collections, reviews and more!

Hi all,   This is no April Fool’s joke 😉  ;  the Live Search team has just released a dozen new enhancements for its Live Search Maps service available at maps.live.com!   Firefox users now have their own plug-in to use 3-D! Customers complained; we listened. Zooming around the virtual landscape is not just for Internet Explorer Users any more; users of Firefox 1.5 or later can click on the 3D button at http...
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We are flattered, but...

For those of you who use some of the advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:, you may have noticed that this functionality has been recently turned off. We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators. We are doing our best to...
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Breaking Out of the Browser

Got Vista? Then check out these two Live Search gadgets for your Vista Sidebar and stop waiting for that browser to load! Today we’re announcing the launch of two new gadgets that bring some of the most popular Live Search services directly to your desktop:   Live Search Gadget – [Download]       This lightweight gadget uses a web service to fetch your search results and render them directly in the widget for the...
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Live Search for Mobile Launches at 3GSM

Searching for Love? Or Just Love to Search? On the bus home from work, Jim realizes it’s Valentine’s Day and he hasn’t prepared any dinner plans with his wife Katie! Instead of panicking, he pulls out his Windows Mobile device and opens Live Search for mobile. He navigates the Categories list to Restaurants, then Ethnic Restaurants until he finds Italian Restaurants, Katie’s favorite food.       He...
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Live Search SOAP API – Updated!

We’re proud to announce that we’re taking our search API out of beta, and rebranding it the Live Search SOAP API 1.0, to reflect the search engine that is powering it.   This release provides continued enhancements to the original API, from which you submit up to 10,000 queries per day for News, Local, or general Web content. We’ve reviewed a lot of feedback from our developer’s forum and this blog, and have made the...
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Use Live Search and We'll Donate to Team Seattle and Ninemillion.org

The Live Search team recently launched two new programs to help children in need, and we would love you to help us out. The good news is that all you have to do to help us is try Live Search on one of our “click for the cause” sites, and each search you do will add more money to Microsoft’s donation. The two organizations we are working with in these programs are  ninemillion.org and Team Seattle. Ninemillion.org is a...
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Visit the Live Search Team at Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

Live Search is going to have a great presence in the Microsoft booth at CES this year, and we would love for Live Search blog readers who are going to CES to stop by and talk to us. We will have program managers and product managers from the search team there all week, so it’s a great opportunity to give feedback directly to the product team, and get your questions about Live Search answered on the spot. The Live Search team will be in four...
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