The Top of Live Search for 2006

Live Search went live in 2006, and it has been a great year for us and our users searching the Web. With the year drawing to a close, we decided to put together lists of the top searches for 2006. These lists are the result of studying our anonymous logs for the most searched queries in all the countries and regions our users search from. After putting together the list of the Top 10 searches for this year, we became curious about which queries...
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Live Search Books Beta Release

Several new enhancements of note from the Search team: Tomorrow we’re releasing the beta version of Live Search Books (http://books.live.com). Check out the user experience: very clean! With this initial release we’ve focused on making the reading experience as natural as possible. The U.S. beta launch of Live Search Books is a big step forward in advancing the way people discover information through the integration of content that...
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Search on the Go with Live Search for Mobile Beta

What’s on your wish list this holiday season? Wish you could find the closest toy store when you’re on the go? The nearest coffee shop on a cold winter day? Get news reports or traffic information on the move? Windows Live has granted those wishes and more: we’re proud to announce three new ways to search on the go: Mobile Software – Download an application to your phone for local search, maps, driving directions, and...
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Search robots in disguise

There are plenty of bots out there and, as a result, some conventions have arisen.  Well-behaved bots identify themselves with a unique user-agent.  They also follow the robots.txt conventions, which allow webmasters to control how their sites are crawled.   Here at Live Search, our crawlers are identified by the user-agent ‘MSNBot’.  This may seem a little non-intuitive, but many webmasters depend on this, and...
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Virtual Earth 3D beta: A new dimension for mapping and Live Search

What if mapping the world was more like a video game?   What if you could fly like Superman and figure out where to meet your friends for a good meal and which routes to avoid to beat traffic?   With Live Search maps you can find yellow pages and white pages information, get live traffic conditions and view stunning 3D and Birds Eye …just as if you were gaming in Second Life, but with real-world information embedded in real...
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Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! Unite to Support Sitemaps

Today, we are excited to announce that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are coming together in support of the SiteMaps protocol.  The goal of this effort is to improve search results for customers around the world.  This protocol enables site owners everywhere to tell search engines about the content on their site instead of having to rely  solely on crawl algorithms to find it. So, why are we excited to work on this?  Because by...
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Working with Advanced Queries in the Live Search Box

So, now that you’ve (a) provisioned a Live Search Box for your site, and (b) updated it with a cool look and feel, you are finally ready to build the search query of your dreams. Back in the old days, search boxes generally gave you two options: (1) search the whole Web or (2) search only your site. With the advanced query parameters of Live Search, you now have complete control to search the subset of the Web you define, and get the results...
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Hacking the Look and Feel of the Live Search Box

We’ve just posted an article on dev.live.com that looks at a few simple hacks you can do with the Live Search Box, to change its look and feel. You can use these hacks to make the search box fit better into the design of your site. List of hacks: Applying the Windows Live styling to the basic search box Adding default text to the search box Auto-selecting the search box when the page loads Ensuring compatibility with ActiveX and other smart...
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Add Search to Your Site with the Live Search Box

(And, yes, it supports Firefox too!) Today, we’re proud to announce the launch of the Live Search Box, to bring the power of search to your Web site or blog through a cool widget. Check it out: When the user enters a query, the search box dynamically builds a floating <DIV> on your page to display the search results. You can customize the query in the first tab to search your site, your macro or anything else, while the second tab...
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Cornell University joins Live Book Search

We are excited to announce that Cornell University has joined our Book Search initiative. Like all of our library scanning partnerships, the Cornell project will focus on scanning books in the public domain. Cornell and Microsoft will be teaming with Kirtas Technologies in Victor, NY to digitize the books. Kirtas uses non-destructive scanning—an obvious must for library collections!   Cornell has an impressive collection that will...
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