Now all of eBay’s “Buy it Now” offers will be eligible for cashback rewards. With eBay’s expansive catalog of products, from jewelry to electronics, you’ll start to see more cashback ads appearing in our search results. That means more ways for you to save. You’ll see three primary differences between this user experience and other cashback user experiences: There’s an eBay ad with a cashback gleam (the...
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One of the most exciting developments we’ve had in the last year was the success of our inaugural Search and Give program where your queries helped to raise more than $250,000 for local schools and non-profits. Over the course of the year the program generated cash donations for more than 20,000 organizations ranging from schools to non-profits such as Doctors Without Borders and ASPCA (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to...
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We at Live Search are pleased to announce another collaboration with Yahoo and Google aimed at making webmasters’ lives easier. Webmasters have long used the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to control how search engines access and display their content. The REP offers an easy and efficient way to communicate with search engines, and is currently used by millions of publishers worldwide. Over the past few years, we have been working with...
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Has this ever happened to you? You search online for information and click a promising link only to get an error page staring back at you: These generic 404 error pages leave you stranded, with no option but to click the back button and start over, or just give up altogether — not very helpful. We thought about this problem and realized that we had all the pieces to offer something much more useful. We could help website owners create...
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With today’s HP announcement and the recent MSN toolbar release, I want to discuss our recent moves in the toolbar space. Overall, these distribution deals come down to three things: 1. Live Search is ready for primetime These types of deals require a search engine that can stand on its own, as we all know how easy it is to switch to another search engine. Sure, Live Search has room to improve, but we’re confident that when consumers...
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Check it out: We realize that often you just need to get a sense of what your query is about. Wikipedia is great for that — you can learn enough from the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article to start you out on the right path. For Wikipedia results, we now show a good portion of the first paragraph and a few links from the table of contents. You can see more about the topic right there and see what else the article offers. We hope...
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Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision...
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In our last release of Live Search for Windows Mobile we snuck in a little feature that allows users to send feedback directly to the engineering team. Since then, we’ve received tons of messages from users, many of which have been requests for new functionality. So what’s the moral of the story? Ask, and you shall receive. Here’s the list of some of the cool stuff we’ve built in response to user feedback. Weather  By...
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Along with the release of our new search experience, we’d like to give some background into the design team and process that went into all the changes you see. You might not immediately think of design as being a critical part of a search product, but we think it is, and we have a growing team of designers, researchers, and developers who believe it, too. We have a growing, pro-design community here at Microsoft as well (only fitting to plug...
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We’ve introduced our “Renaissance” release of Live Search QnA Beta. Our re-birth signifies the beginning of a new set of features that we’ll continue to grow. We had three goals for this release: Focus on the QnA experience for new users. Encourage users to discover content and functionality in new ways. Highlight and award higher quality content by featuring members who are Top Contributors in given areas of expertise...
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