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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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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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 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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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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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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Now that Zach’s given you the user-friendly introduction to how macros work, let me take you on a tour of the gears and inner workings that we expose in our advanced syntax. These operators allow you to do some really interesting things with macros. A New Operator We have one new, very exciting operator: LinkFromDomain. Using LinkFromDomain in your search includes all sites that are linked from a given domain. This complements LinkDomain...
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