Andrew Ma's WebLog : Commerce Search

Windows Live Search - Products

ajma — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 20:39:00 GMT

It's been 6 months from the last time I posted about Product Searching in Windows Live Search. Our team is still well and kicking. To prove it, today you can go to our newly revamped site (http://search.live.com/). In the past, you would have to look for the "Products" tab. When you do searches now, you'll notice that you get search results directly inline above the search results (based on your keyword). Here's a Halo 3 search.

(BTW, if you're looking for a co-op player to do the legendary campaign, here's my gamertag)

If you have an Xbox 360, most of you will likely get Halo 3. (Aside: watch Halo 3 commercials, they're great) But let's say you're looking for something else and you want to do some product research before making the purchase. Here's where our team has made changes that really shine.

Above, you'll see a screenshot of a search for a Canon Rebel XTi. The user reviews show you it's an excellent camera. We don't base this of our own recommendation, but rather we crawl the web for user reviews. This is where the real magic is. You'll see something like "99% positive" on the left side under "Photo Quality". You may be wondering: "but he said it was crawled reviews". Yup, it's crawled and categorized automatically. This Opinion Index feature has the capability to determine whether our crawled reviews are positive or negative. This should give you, the user, a great number of reviews to go by. Many other review sites will give you something like "5 stars (based on 2 users)". The 2 users may not be a very good sample, but now with Live Search, we're providing you with tens, sometimes hundreds, of reviews together in one location.

If you have any feedback, feel free to post it below. We'd love to hear from you as we're hard at working at some cool feature improvements that we want to make. Got something you want added? Leave me a comment below and I'll pitch the requests to the rest of the team.

Andrew J. Ma
Windows Live Search
SDE/T

More Images, More Relevant

ajma — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 03:17:00 GMT

The Product Search team is still hard at work. Imran and Ling give some details on some relevancy and image improvements we've done.

Check it out: http://productsearch.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D789A2CD819EF461!197.entry

Product Search Grid View

ajma — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 01:50:00 GMT

Sorry for being so silent on this blog, but we've been hard at work on product search. A lot of it has been backend work, so you won't see too much, but one notable thing we've added recently is the Grid View. Now when you search for things you buy, you can see a lot more items all at once.

Give it a try: http://products.live.com/

Windows Live Product Search

ajma — Fri, 05 May 2006 09:16:00 GMT

In a post last week, I mentioned that there was more to come. Earlier tonight, we unveiled yet another product that the MSN Shopping team has been working on. We released Windows Live Product Search. Now folks searching on live.com will be able to search for things they are looking to buy. Please keep in mind this is also still a beta. We put a lot of hard work into this and this was a fun and challenging experience.

Firefox users will be glad to know that the site does indeed work for Firefox. And for those who think MS is out to screw firefox, know that there were questions from management to ask if Product Search supports firefox. The answer is yes. (unless you got an old version, we found a few problems if you're running an older build of firefox).

We have a team blog set up here: http://spaces.msn.com/productsearch. There's a post with our lead PMs introduction to what Product Search is about. I'm in one of the team pictures. Also, there's another picture of me really relaxed in our daily scrum meeting.