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 in their April Fo

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 throttle

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 with all s

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://maps.live.com

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

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 fastest search results

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

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

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

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

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

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 live traffic information in a faster, richer and more interactive user interface

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

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-world cities where advertising really matters?
 
Check out our beta for Virtual Earth™  3D , a new online mapping feature launched this week by Live Search.  You can see terrain information for all over the world, and explore these U.S

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 agreeing on a standard, we can provide site owners

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

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 objects
But this is really only the beginning of what you can do

(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

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 be of interest to researchers around the world…you

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

The best day to work on a large scale service like Live Search is the day when you launch new improvements.  By that measure, today is one of the best days our team has had in a long time J .
 
Some folks have had a sneak peak, but for the most part we’ve kept our new Live Search experience under wraps until the time was ripe.  Since March we’ve tested, taken your feedback, iterated, and tested some more

In addition to the testing we’re doing you may have seen the news we launched Windows Live QnA beta this week! A link to it is also showing up in the search bar on our recent testing.
For all of you still new to our question-and-answer service, we will be providing more blog posts here to help guide you through the features, but here’s a quick roundup of what you will see with the Windows Live QnA beta:

  A smooth interface that enables you to ask, answer and vote on a question.
   A free-form “tagging” system that allows you to attach your own keywords and phrases to your question to make it more discoverable by other users

We have been hard at work on Windows Live Search to create some new features that we hope our customers will love.  As anyone who works on a service knows – the only real way to know if you’re successful is to run a test, and see what people think.

Well, that’s just what we’re in the process of doing

Betsynote: Joseph didn’t want to leave you hanging from his previous post about Windows Live Search being available in Windows Live Messenger...
 
 The Web Search and News Search are available in 9 top-level markets, and Images Search is available in 3 English markets. Please enjoy it and feel free to give me your feedback

Betsynote: Not to be outdone, Beau realized his officemate Ajay would be having a birthday…but here’s how Ajay tells it….

I’m Ajay, a graduate student from the Masters of Information Systems Management program at Carnegie Mellon; I’m a program manager intern working on Core search feature development

We’re excited to announce that Windows Live Toolbar is not only out of beta but also packed with new features to help you find precisely what you’re looking for, surf with powerful protection and personalize your experience on the Web. Since the toolbar is an add-in to the browser, these features are ubiquitously accessible from any web page

I feel like I’m always expecting packages.  In fact, I have been receiving a steady stream of packages for the last five months because my husband and I are remodeling our 1930 house we recently purchased.
At first it was fun, kind of like having a birthday everyday — but then it got challenging to keep track of everything that we had ordered.  Using the package tracking features on the various shipping companies’ websites became a tedious daily ritual. 
But, how cool is this?  I got to be part of solving my own problem through my work.  I am a Program Manager on Instant Answers and my team and I just finished developing a new Instant Answer that has since alleviated the annoyances of tracking all my packages.  Now I can go to MSN Search  to track packages from any of four providers, FedEx, DHL, UPS, and USPS.  I no longer have to navigate to four distinct sites and follow four processes to see the status of my packages

 
My name is Beau Hollis.  I’m a grad student at the University of Florida, and as of today, I’m 23 years old.  I’m a Program Manager Intern for Windows Live Search.  I help define the user experience for the Windows Live Search page.  I really love my job and my team, and of course, all the great friends I have made out here