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
Today we released the Shoposphere and Pick Lists beta, plus enhancements to our core shopping search capabilities, which we hope youll try out during your holiday gift-giving spree.
The Shoposphere and Pick Lists are examples of social commerce. We believe the community of shoppers is one of the best sources for product information and advice. The Shoposphere is a place to discover interesting and cool products thematically arranged into Pick Lists by other shoppers. Its always changing. It includes new lists in a product stream and highest rated lists which are a fun way to explore new products and trends. The Shoposphere will continue to evolve as a hub for other types of user-generated content.
Pick Lists are lists of products on any topic, and can include any of the 90 million products available through Yahoo! Shopping. With Pick Lists, users can share their knowledge about products theyve researched for the benefit of the community. Anyone can view a Pick List in the Shoposphere, rate it, and comment on it. What we like most is that Pick Lists show off the 'long tail' of shopping search. Its not just about digital cameras and iPods, but anything you can think of. You can peruse Pick Lists for such delights as fake food, denim leg warmers, and fuel cell experiment kits. And, we've also integrated the Yahoo! 360 social network into Pick Lists (and user reviews) so you can see if youre connected to the creator of the content.
Weve also done a lot to improve our core shopping search, starting with a new search UI with easier scanning of prices and product reviews. We've integrated deals into search results so that free shipping offers, rebates, and coupons are a click of the mouse away. My Lists allow you to easily save, organize, and share product lists. You can make multiple lists including wish lists for you or your friends or lists for researching products, etc. And these lists are easy to share with email and RSS or can be kept private. Finally weve launched a new product overview page that integrates editorial reviews, user reviews, product specs, deals and price comparison all in one place to help you make informed buying decisions.
Thats it for now. Please check out the Shoposphere, build a Pick List, and tell us what you think of our shopping search capabilities. The beta is a first step and we plan on rolling out more and more features to make this the best experience possible. Look for tagging, search enhancements, more 360 integration, badges for putting a Pick List on your blog, and other surprises coming soon. We'd love your feedback on this.
David Beach
Product Manager, Yahoo! Shopping
Vivek Gupta
Engineering Manager, Yahoo! Shopping
We will be making changes to the index tonight. You should see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. This update will be complete by tomorrow (Monday) morning.
As always if you have any feedback for us about the new index please email: ystfeedback@yahoo.com. Please provide specific feedback that includes either:
1) Specific query terms where the results are good or bad.
2) Specific domains that you feel are either being under or over indexed.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Tim Mayer
Yahoo! Search
There has been lot of discussion about what Web 2.0 really is, so we thought we’d use the power of Web 2.0 itself to come up with the answer, and here it is:
42.
Just kidding. What we actually did was take a look at all the tag data going back to February 2004 (the month of the first use of Web 2.0 as a tag on del.icio.us), and analyzed all the bookmarks and tags related to the term. We can report that as of October 31, 2005 there have been over 230,000 separate bookmarks and over 7,000 unique tags associated with the term “Web 2.0” by del.icio.us users. So for this exercise, we lopped off the really long tail and normalized some similar terms (e.g. combining blog, blogs, and blogging), and came up with this snapshot of what Web 2.0 REALLY is – at least according to del.icio.us users' most popular tags through the end of October 2005:
| ajax | 9.9% |
| blog | 6.1% |
| social | 4.2% |
| tools | 4.1% |
| software | 3.3% |
| tagging | 3.3% |
| javascript | 2.8% |
| internet | 2.6% |
| programming | 2.5% |
| rss | 2.5% |
Other notable tags included rubyonrails (1.8%), del.icio.us (1.6%), folksonomy (1.4%), community (1.1%), wiki (.9%), flickr (.8%), free (.7%), trends (.6%), flock (.4%) and googlemaps (.3%).
So there you have it - interesting, but it still seems to fall short of a definitive answer. Maybe the blinding flash of the obvious is that Web 2.0 is best defined as arguing about what Web 2.0 is really about.