Author Archive

Our friends over at www.ViaVirtualEarth.com are helping us run a contest for developers building Virtual Earth mashups.  If you have already written a cool Virtual Earth application or have a great idea for one, now is your chance to possibly turn that application into a prize of $1000.   It might be worth investigating the competition over in the VE Gallery like Poly9’s MSNBC news event map or Nikhil Kothari’s Photo Map. The contest ends October 14th, so check it out.

Viavirtualearth also has a bunch of interesting articles, tutorials, and examples to help you get started developing for Virtual Earth quickly. 
 

Alex Daley

MapPoint Technical Evangelist

As we release more instant answers, we get a lot of great feedback on them.  One common question, also brought up by Scoble recently (with follow up), goes something like this: “I like it when you show the stock answer for queries like msft and intc, but why doesn’t it appear for other valid tickers like play?”

We could simply show the answer for all known financial symbols.  The problem is when someone searches for play, it could mean a lot of things besides the stock price of PortalPlayer.  A similar problem happens for searches on just a company name.  Before we show an instant answer, we try very hard to make sure it’s highly relevant.  Otherwise we would be pushing web results down the page for nothing.

Here’s another perspective.  When you search for msft, you would expect most of the web results to be about Microsoft.  What about searching for jobs, life or pets?  Would you expect most of the web results to be about 51job Inc, Lifeline Systems or PetMed Express?  If not, does it make sense for the stock prices of these companies to appear prominently?  We don’t think so, and Google and Yahoo both take a similar approach with these three tickers.  Also imagine a case where 17 instant answers can trigger for a specific query – does anyone want to see all 17 prominently on the page to keep each answer consistent?  However, if you add extra words like “stock quote” to the symbol or company name, the intent is clearer and we show the stock instant answer.

We realize that some people still just want the stock prices for jobs, life and pets.  There is also an element of serendipity when a good answer seems to appear out of the blue.  We are working on a few ideas for something that will handle these cases, without sacrificing relevance.

Do we always get this right?  Absolutely not!  If you come across any bad examples or have other thoughts on how we should handle this, please let us know.  We’ll take a look.

Jamie Buckley, MSN Search PM

Oilman beat me to the punch posting this one. Yesterday, Yusuf Medhi, MSN SVP, asked us to invite people to join the US MSN adCenter Pilot. I am going to extend the invitation to apply to all of our loyal blog readers. We want all of you to have a shot. See below for the invite and information on how to apply. 

     Brady Forrest, MSN Search PM

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From: Yusuf Mehdi

As you know, we launched MSN adCenter --our next generation advertising platform -- in France and Singapore last month. This was an important first step to delivering our global vision to connect advertisers to consumers in a more meaningful way.

Now, as we prepare to launch the US pilot of MSN adCenter, we need your help in getting your friends and family to apply to participate in the self-service offering for small-to-medium businesses. This pilot represents a unique opportunity for small and medium businesses to be among the first to experience the more powerful tools and wide-ranging benefits of MSN adCenter. Our paid search offering will help advertisers:

• Learn by accessing comprehensive data to plan more strategic campaigns,
• Connect by using advanced demographics to target the right audience at the right place and time, and
• Refine by making meaningful changes on the fly with features for greater flexibility and control.

If you know a business-owner who would be interested in advertising their business on MSN Search, please forward this email to them and encourage them to apply to participate in the US Pilot by completing our online registration form at http://advertising.msn.com/adCenterPilot/89620.asp.

 Please note that entry in the US pilot is by invitation only. We will select participants on a rolling basis from those you refer and who express interest. During the US pilot, MSN adCenter will be delivering text-based advertisements on up to 25 percent of MSN Search traffic; the remaining traffic will continue to be served through our partnership with Yahoo.

I hope that you will support this important initiative by sharing this information with your friends and family. We look forward to serving their advertising needs and gathering their valuable feedback on our products and services.

 thanks,

 Yusuf

Finally, MSN Search was visited by Channel 9 – the amazing MSDN Web site that brings the people of Microsoft to you in video.  Erik Selberg and I joined Robert Scoble for a lively, hour-long discussion.  Check out the video here.

 

We talk about:

• the neural network (see June 21 post), 01:30
• static versus dynamic rank (see our May 03 post), 04:00
• search engine optimization, 08:20
• the nature of relevance, 12:00
• index size (see Aug 29 Post), 17:00
• the 64 bit Windows infrastructure of MSN Search, 24:00
• Link based importance, 38:00

And lots more -- check it out! BTW, in a small world moment, Erik and I worked together on software for psychology experiments when we attended Carnegie Mellon way back in 1990. We also shared a wall between our respective abodes, and… wait, those stories are for a different blog!

 

Andy Edmonds, Program Management

Last week, we announced MSN Book Search and our joining the OCA. Yesterday, we announced a partnership with the British Library to digitize and make available via MSN Book Search, 25 million pages (roughly 100,000 books) from the British Library’s collection over the next year.

This partnership with the British Library represents another step in MSN Search’s goal to provide the most relevant answers to users’ queries. Through our British Library partnership, we will be able to bring trusted content to users, irrespective of the format of the content. We will predominantly focus on digitizing out of copyright material in this partnership.

We believe that Microsoft’s key value add is in software and in our community of users. We look forward to enabling interesting user experiences with trusted content from the British Library. We aspire to give the users the ability not just to view pages out of a book, but really act on the information in contextually relevant ways, both in the search experience as well as in the applications they are using.

There are a lot of challenges as we embark upon this journey – digitization, indexing, ranking, enabling the best user experience while searching, enabling users to act on the information they find etc., and we look forward to tackling these challenges. We are fortunate to be in a company that has invested for many years in advanced reading technologies, and is investing in making great viewing experiences possible. This is going to be a fun ride!

On a personal note, this is one of those “You are kidding. They pay you to do that?” jobs – What is more fun that helping bring the world’s knowledge to everyone? Now, I am off to work with the British Librabry to figure out which material to digitize first. As our CEO normally says - I…..LOVE…..THIS…..COMPANY!!!

Thirumalai Anandanpillai
Product Planning, MSN Search
On behalf of the MSN Search Content Acquisition Team

Today at the IT Forum in Barcelona, the latest version of Windows Desktop Search (WDS) and MSN Search Toolbar, both enabled for easy enterprise deployment, will say “Hola!” to the world!

With this new release, enterprise IT departments can easily and securely deploy, customize and manage Windows Desktop Search across their entire PC network (both Windows XP and Widnows 2000 SP4+). Not only is WDS free to deploy with your Windows License, it also provides flexible customization settings for IT departments, extensibility to search over proprietary or unique types of files and is supported in 15 languages, with more to coming soon!

This is truly an exciting day for our team. I’ve been involved in many enterprise software applications in the past and must admit that the excitement that enterprises have expressed over WDS is unprecedented.  Since our initial launch of MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search for consumers earlier in the year, we have been inundated with requests for an enterprise-ready version from companies all over the world, representing nearly every major industry, ranging from financial services, high-tech to pharmaceuticals, government agencies and more.

Over the past several months, we’ve diligently worked with an incredible set of early adopter customers to fine tune the requirements and needs of the enterprise environment. Today, we’re finally ready to make the latest release of Windows Desktop Search available to everyone.  We hope that the product will empower information technology managers to help their employees gain back at least 30 more minutes of productivity by enabling them to find virtually any information on their desktop fast.

To learn more, go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/enterprise.

Gracias!

-Denise Ho
Windows Desktop Search Program Manager

A little over a year ago we began inviting groups of academics, bloggers, siteowners, and technologists out to Redmond to talk about search. We call them Search Champs. We usually select this group based on who we are reading and we think would provide us great insight. We spend a couple of days with the group showing them our future plans, getting their input and making connections. Every time we hold these sessions we inevitably hear from people who want to be included, but we had never heard of them or didn’t know that they would be interested in MSN Search. It’s always with regret that we have to turn people away.

We don’t want to make this mistake again and this time we are going to do an Open Call for anyone to apply to be a Search Champ. We want to hear from you! If you want to shape the future of our product then please fill out this application.  The event will take place in Redmond (on the MS campus) from 1/24-1/26 and expenses will be paid by us. Champs will be selected based on who applies and what products we are reviewing. Hope to meet you!

Brady Forrest
MSN Search Team