Author Archive

Betsynote: In advance of questions – Yes, this works stuff in Firefox. Yes, I want to go shopping.

We are pleased to announce the beta release of Windows Live Product Search (http://products.live.com).

Product search leverages the latest research from Microsoft Research Asia to find products available on the internet for sale.  At beta, the index contains commercial offers from over 100,000 sellers, which is made possible by integrating new algorithmic product classifiers and information extraction technology into the search system.

Traditional shopping search sites enable search over data provided by select merchants.  Leveraging a wide range of information on the web enables indexing of hard-to-find and unique products and sellers available online.  Try searching for your favorite products or give the following team favorites a try: alien queen 1/4 scale, bhindi masala, or Andrew Jackson signed documents.

The user interface stays true to the simplicity of the search paradigm and inherits many features common to the Windows Live search family such as smart scroll, image hovering, and level of detail slider.  In addition, users are able to refine their searches by: Related term, Brand, Seller and Price.

There are still many features that that are not yet implemented in the initial Beta for Product Search.  These features include: product ratings & reviews, item clustering and a bigger selection. The product team is continually working on improving the quality of the site and would love to get your feedback: http://feedback.live.com/default.aspx?productkey=wlsearchproduct&P1

You can find more information about Product search and the Product search team on the Windows Live Product search Blog (http://spaces.msn.com/productsearch)

-- Imran Aziz, Lead Program Manager
On behalf of the Windows Live Product Search team.

 

As you may have heard, we have been working away on a question and answer service for Windows Live Search.  Yesterday a few pages for the beta signup were posted by accident so we decided to get the word out formally and open up the beta invite page at http://ideas.live.com today. You can get a lot more detail on the QnA team blog at http://spaces.msn.com/liveqna, but here is a quick summary of why we’re so excited about this service.
 
This new Windows Live Search offering will help consumers simply find what they need, from a large community of helpful and knowledgeable people. This allows consumers to tap into the power of the online community by facilitating a melting pot of human knowledge that isn’t easily accessible or available on the Internet today.          

Some key features include: 
• Providing a place for people to ask any question, get credible answers and vote on the quality of the responses on any given topic from the Windows Live QnA community. 
• People can rate answers and reputation-based scoring is available so you know which sources to follow.
• Questions are tagged so others can easily find similar or related questions and answers.
• Together we are creating a store of human knowledge containing facts, opinions and experiences on topics ranging from business, health, arts, sports, technology and more.  

Ultimately, QnA will be deeply integrated with Windows Live Search, providing a rich, integrated searching service – enabling you to search and find answers on the Web, or from experts on any given topic as part of your search experience.

Windows Live QnA beta is the latest example of our efforts to continue to redefine search to make it faster and more relevant for our consumers with live connections to information they want. We want to put the consumer in control of their search experience, customize it for their context, present search results in the most usable format, and empower users to make their own choices. 
 
Also, in case you missed it last Friday, Microsoft is now syndicating Live Search results to A9.com and Alexa.  We are very excited to be chosen by A9 to provide this service for their innovative site. This agreement further validates the growth in importance of the Windows Live Search service across the Internet.

As always we welcome your feedback and be sure to sign up for the beta!

Ken Moss
General Manager, Web Search

On April 19th we released a new version of site search for MSNBC.com built entirely on the MSN Search platform. This is a great improvement from our previous site search solutions and one we think that people will find really useful for searching news.

Take a peek at http://msnbc.msn.com and try searching for a few of the topics in the news like E3, gas prices or (my personal favorite) Britney Spears. To provide results we have taken advantage of both the news and web indexes. When something is current in the news you will find recent results in the top section of the first page. For topics that do not have any recent coverage on MSNBC we also provide results from our archive.

Implementation was pretty simple for our engineering team. We used the MSN Search API to retrieve a few different sets of data for each query we receive and then assemble them when rendering the results. We took advantage of some of the advanced query operators to scope the results right for news.

Each query uses a set of pre-defined operators to set the correct domain and allows us to filter the results a bit to return specific types of pages. Adding a few extra SearchTags to all of our pages allows us to do things such as return only stories and filter out category pages from the results. Also adding the path to a photo as a SearchTag enables us to add thumbnails to the results on the fly.  If you have never heard of SearchTags you should definitely check out this post.

The end result of all of this is that it makes it much easier for us to add new features without having to totally change our whole application. For example will be able to easily add advanced search options in an upcoming release as all the functionality is already in place, we now just need the UI. We have just started down the path of making news search on MSNBC into a great experience and will continue to add features such as advanced search and photo search over the next couple of months.

We are reading every piece of feedback we receive so if you have any comments or feature suggestions just let us know:
http://feedback.search.msn.com/feedbacksearch.aspx?productkey=msnbcsearch&P1=dsatmsnbc&P2=msnsearchblog&P4=AE

-- Kelly Amsbry, Product Manager

On behalf of the MSNSBC.com News team

We on the Search team want to congratulate the 12 winners of the Microsoft Live Labs "Accelerating Search in Academic Research” Awards.

Researchers from 36 countries submitted proposals for research to advance the field of search.  The 12 winners will receive grant money from Microsoft Live Labs and access to a set of MSN Search query logs in order to push forward our understanding of the Internet, search, and online social behaviors.

 The results of the research we’re funding are intended to be totally open to the public.  We’re encouraging the awardees to publish what they find in peer reviewed journals and at conferences.  Nothing about this is proprietary.  It’s our gift back to the research community.

Proposal	Principal Investigators	Affiliations	Country
Combining Econometric and Text Mining Approaches for Measuring the Effect of Online Information Exchange	Panagiotis Ipeirotis - Anindya Ghose	New York University	USA
Discovering and Using Meta-Terms	Bruce Croft	University of Massachusetts Amherst	USA
Deepening Search: From the Surface to the Deep Web	Kevin Chang	Univ. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	USA
Entity and Relation Types in Web Search: Annotation, Indexing and Scoring Techniques	Soumen Chakrabarti	IIT Bombay	India
Incorporating Trust into Web Authority	Brian Davison	Lehigh University	USA
Mine Query/Click Log for Collaborative Internet Search	ChengXiang Zhai	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	USA
Predictive Exploitation of Click-Through Knowledge	Alistair Moffat	University of Melbourne	Australia
Social Search: Bringing the Social Component to the Web	Gerd Stumme	Knowledge and Data Engineering Group; University of Kassel	Germany
Statistical Machine Learning for User Modelling	Zoubin Ghahramani	University of Cambridge; Carnegie Mellon University; University College London	United Kingdom
The Truth is Out There: Aggregating Answers from Multiple Web Sources	Amelie Marian	Rutgers University	USA
Vinegar: Leading Indicators in Query Logs	Eytan Adar - Brian Bershad - Steven Gribble	University of Washington; CSE	USA
VISP: Visualizing Information Search Processes	Lada Adamic - Suresh Bhavnani	School of Information; University of Michigan	USA

 Each researcher, along with their proposal, submitted a budget which was used to determine one–year grant awards of between $30-50,000.  They’re also getting access to more than 15 million real-user queries with click through information,along with an increased query quota for use of the MSN Search API.

What’s important to know is that the search query logs they will be studying have been carefully scrubbed to be completely anonymous – there’s no information about who issued a query.  In addition, we’ve filtered the query terms themselves to remove credit card numbers, phone numbers, social security numbers and email addresses.

To support the researchers, the Search team and Microsoft Research staff took extra effort to make sure the data was clean, ensuring both customer privacy is protected while academic inquiry is preserved.  Researchers are under strict license in using the data, which also protects customer privacy.

We haven’t decided yet whether this RFP program will be awarded next year, but if you’re interested in other funding opportunities with Microsoft, keep checking back here:

http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/default.aspx

--Ramez Naam, Director of Program Management, Search

(Betsynote:Yes, I know it's a mouthful of a label! But it's pretty cool!)

Our friends over on the Mail Desktop team have been experimenting with ways to bring search right into a user’s inbox experience. Imagine you’ve received an email about the Arlo Guthrie show coming up later this summer...Live Mail Desktop’s Active Search would present search results about this show, as well as sponsored links offering perhaps a chance to buy tickets or read a review of the concert.

We’re getting a ton of great feedback on Windows Live Search.  One of the most common requests is to build the instant answers already available on MSN Search.  We hear you and are working hard to get them all in.  In fact, we just recently launched our first batch - instant answers for news and local!

 

The news instant answer will appear on searches for topical news stories.  Keywords are identified algorithmically, updated every few minutes.  It’s impossible to predict which ones will work when you read this, but iraq and george bush are pretty safe bets.

 

We can also show the top local listings right on our web results page.  This is great when you are looking for a phone number or address of a local business.  You just need to type a category or business name along with a location (city, city/state or zip).  Try our instant answers to find an edison, nj dentist or seattle pizza places.

 

Looking for other kinds of instant answers?  Found a problem with one we already have?  Please send us your feedback.  We’re listening.

 

 

----Jamie Buckley

PM, Instant Answer Team

 

Betsynote: Thanks to a comment on our Spaces blog, Jamie gave me a new URL for the above Instant Answers link that loads  better. Try it and let us know what you think.

On April 18^th, MSDN launched site-wide its first effort in improving the customer search experience by building a targeted UI that is powered by the MSN SOAP API.  This allowed us to offer our customers the following benefits:

·         Improved Performance

·         Content Relevance – Benefit from ever-improving MSN Search

·         Community Searches across MSDN blogs, Forums, and CodeZone Partner Sites

·         Customer Feedback opportunities through MSDN Search Blog, and MSN Search Feedback loop.

These features were enhanced by the fact that we built off the MSN Service.  The results have been outstanding! In the time since we have launched we have seen big improvements in customers’ responses to search as well as big advances in click throughs on the first page of the results.  You can view this new UI at MSDN.

The cool thing for MSDN is that because of the flexibility of MSN, we have been able to listen to the customers and build even more unique experiences in an effort to assist our customers.  (To understand the approach take a minute and watch this MSDN TV article).  As we examined future possible outcomes and implementations, we came up with the following UI that we would like to introduce for your consideration, our first iteration of these features.  You can see the search and play with it at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/search/refinement.aspx. 

In contrast to our released design, there are no tabs in our prototype. We removed the tabs because we heard from customers that they didn't see them. But we also heard you wanted the content, so we combined the content into a set of queries we can send to the API and we then use the data returned to let you filter out the content you don't want.  For example, if you are searching for a term like “ATLAS,” you can remove the blog sites from the results.  

Additionally, it is important to remember because we built on the MSN Search API, in any version you can modify your query with the MSN query language.  Here are some examples of how this helps MSDN queries:

Operation	Syntax	Examples
All Terms	term1 AND term2 term1 & term2 term1 term2	Console AND WriteLine Console & WriteLine Console WriteLine
Any Terms	term1 OR term2 term1 | term2	Word OR Excel Word | Excel
Exclude	term1 -term2	FindWindow -CE
Group	(term1 term2)	FindWindow AND (CE OR MFC)
Exact Phrase	"phrase"	"Provider Toolkit"
Preference	prefer:[op]term2	FindWindow prefer:MFC

So play, have fun, and let us know what you like and don’t like.  We are working on a few more features including; Narrow by Product, Narrow by Keyword, Text Suggestion, and more.  You can influence this process. If something is not working let us know the query you tried, and what is the nature of the topic you are looking for.  We appreciate your feedback and hope to hear from you soon. You can send me feedback at the MSDN Search blog.

---Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager MSDN

Very soon, we will release a feature of Windows Live Search built into Windows Live Messenger that we think will help you while chatting with your friends. Tell us what you think! You can try this new Search feature from the activities menu of conversation window, it includes our three most popular scoped search features – Web, News and Images. These scoped results are based on Windows Live Search, so you get the same results as if you were searching on live.com.

Have you ever been chatting with a friend, decided to see a movie together, but had to open up a new browser window to see what time the movie was? Now, life is easy. You can preview a result within Messenger and send the result link to your friend by clicking one button.

For image search result, you can drag/drop it to set it as your conversation window background or your Display picture, or even send this image to your friend.

We use Atlas framework (Microsoft AJAX technology) to build up this feature, which makes our UI more smooth and comfortable. Since we use asynchronous call to get the search results from backend web service, we can render our page layout dynamically. That’s why user won’t feel any page refresh while loading the results. Best of all, the user can preview the first result while other results are still loading their content.

       In our future release, more exciting features are planned. When a new search scope is launched for live.com, it will be automatically available for our Messenger users.

 

If you have more feedback than you want to give in the comment section of this blog, please go to the links below….

 

  For web, this link

For news, this link

For image, this link

We are reading every piece of feedback we receive and will response to comments as soon as we can. So if you have any comments or feature suggestions just post below or use the feedback link

 

-- Joseph Yao, Program Manager

On behalf of the Search Pane team

 

Betsynote: 5:40 pm June 20 - we had to edit this post after submitting because, well, we jumped the gun in our excitement. When the feature is properly live, we will confirm it is live on the blog...but in the meantime, be watching for it.

Betsynote: 10:12 AM June 22 - reformatted the links so users have an easier time. Let me know what you think.