A lot of search marketers recently noticed that the “link:” command isn’t working at Microsoft’s Windows Live search. Well, it’s not a glitch, but a deliberate shutdown by MSFT…
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. Huh?

Ever since Microsoft launched its own search engine, we’ve heard their claims that they’d gain ground on Google and compete in anywhere from 3-5 years.
Well, as Business Week points out, in the two years since Microsoft dumped Inktomi, it’s not exactly headed in the right direction.
In February, 2005, Microsoft’s MSN Search accounted for nearly 14% of all Web searches, compared with a 46% share for search leader Google, ac

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

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 gained the most popularity compared with last year

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

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 so we chosen not to change it.  In order to make things a little more transparent, we also identify our different types of crawlers.  The complete list is as follows:
 
                MSNBot                                        Main web crawler (www.live.com)
                MSNBot-Media                               Images & all other media (images.live.com)
                MSNBot-NewsBlogs                         News and blogs (search.live.com/news)
                MSNBot-Products                           Products & shopping (products.live.com)
                MSNBot-Academic                          Academic search (academic.live.com)
 
But what about crawlers that aren’t so well-behaved?  After all, anyone could call themselves ‘MSNBot’, and proceed to be as rude and aggressive as they like.  Fortunately, there is a way you can catch these impersonators

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

We recently released a big update to Search Macros.  Thank you to everyone who has sent in feedback since the first release in March.  We were able to incorporate a lot of it into this new version, including great new features like macro homepages and a side-by-side test page!
Search Macros are personalized search engines for any topic area of interest.  You can create them, use them, share them with friends or discover macros created by the community on Windows Live Gallery.
I’d like to use this post to give you a basic overview of using and creating macros.  We’ll use future posts to dive into more of the nitty gritty on specific macros features.
Finding and using macros
Users of the first Macros release told us that using a macro was difficult and not very user friendly.  In this release, every macro now has its own homepage and human readable URL.  This makes them much easier to use, bookmark, and send to friends over email or IM.  For example, check out the homepage for the Reference Sites Search Engine macro (at http://search.live.com/macros/livesearch/reference): 
 
Enter a search term on this page and press Enter