Archive for May, 2007

We are VERY HAPPY to announce that you can once again see your Windows Live Hotmail using the Live.com mail gadget. You can add the gadget back to your page by clicking here.

Remember, you must be a Windows Live Hotmail user to see your mail - be sure to upgrade if you haven't already!

Thanks everyone for your patience. Please let us know if you're seeing any issues.

We are VERY HAPPY to announce that you can once again see your Windows Live Hotmail using the Live.com mail gadget. You can add the gadget back to your page by clicking here.

Remember, you must be a Windows Live Hotmail user to see your mail - be sure to upgrade if you haven't already!

Thanks everyone for your patience. Please let us know if you're seeing any issues.

I would like to share with you my thoughts on how user reviews can improve site search on an ecommerce site. We are seeing an increasing number of our customers allowing their visitors to write reviews and rate their products. Many are using our partners, PowerReviews or BaazarVoice to do this. On a personal level, I can see why this trend is happening; I feel more comfortable buying a product if I can read reviews first. By offering reviews on an ecommerce site it means the prospective customer doesn't have to go somewhere else to get these. Having reviews on a site should increase conversion rates.

The additional information collected from these reviews and ratings can be used to enhance site search in the following ways:

• The ratings summary (normally 1-5 stars) can be displayed in search. In particular this draws peoples attention to the products with good ratings.
  
  
• refine and sort by rating - this allows people to more easily find products with good ratings.
  
  
• Use ratings to weight results. The idea here is to give products that have a better rating more prominence in the search. You do need to be careful with this type of approach - just because a product has a good rating doesn't mean it's relevant for all keywords. But where two products have similar relevance it makes sense to show the one with the better rating first. Our initial experiments with this have been positive.
  
• Index additional text in reviews. The reviews add additional text to your product pages. This is useful for SEO purposes but it is also potentially useful for your site search. If the text in the reviews is indexed by your site search then your visitors are going to be able to find results using a broader range of phrases.
  

User reviews empower people by allowing them to express themselves and influence the choices of others. This fits nicely with SLI's Learning search which uses peoples selection from search results to improve the relevance for others. Together user reviews and site search are a nice complement.

In the last few weeks, we have got some questions about how to display the IE7 Feed View in RTL (Right-To-Left) reading order, which is used by several languages.

The good news: we do have support for RTL.

IE decides whether to show a feed in RTL reading order based on one of three things:

• The language that the feed publisher specifies in the feed
• The default language of the browser (only if the publisher does not specify a feed language).
• The manual reading order selection that the user makes (overrides either of the previous two)

If you are a publisher of an RSS Feed, here is what you need to do to make it show correctly.

IE‘s Feed View is looking for the RSS 2.0 language element (e.g. <language>en-us</language>), or the XML xml:lang attribute for Atom 1.0 feeds (<feed xml:lang="en">)  to determine which direction the feed page should have.

If the language the publisher indicates is known to be displayed RTL by default, IE will automatically switch the ordering. In this examples above (en is "English"), the feed will display as LTR (Left-To-Right). Conversely, if the language element is set to Arabic (<language>ar-SA</language> or just <language>ar</language> for RSS 2.0) the feed will be displayed in RTL (Right-To-Left) order.

Here is what the header of the feed should look like. The value of the language element should be changed to any of the values shown below, depending on the language of the content you are trying to display.

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
   <rss version="2.0"><channel> 
   <title>BBC Arabic News | الصفحة الرئيسية</title> 
   <link>http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/hi/arabic/news/default.stm</link>
<language>ar</language>
...

(You can see this feed live in IE here to see what RTL feeds look like).

Atom 1.0 header should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
   <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="ar">

The following languages will be displayed as RTL by default:

1. Arabic (ar-**)
2. Farsi (fa-**)
3. Urdu (ur-**)
4. Pashtu (ps-**)
5. Syriac (syr-**)
6. Divehi (dv-**)
7. Hebrew (he-**)
8. Yiddish (yi-**)

Please note: the language value must be in lowercase (e.g. ar-SA, he-IL, ur-PK, etc.). The second part of the value (which typically indicates the region), is not used in any way by IE's feed view, and may be omitted.

When the language tag is not included by the publisher, the default IE language is used. For example, if you’re using an English version of IE, then all feeds without the language element are treated as LTR. If you’re using a Hebrew version of IE, then a feed without the language element is treated as RTL.

Finally, there are times when the feed’s language is different from the default language, and the feed language element is not set by the publisher.  In this case, you can manually change the layout to RTL or LTR using the Page menu, encoding-> Right-to-Left Document: or via right-clicking directly on the page itself. See image below:

Hope this helps,

Nick Achmon,
Software Development Engineer in Test