One of the top requests we hear from developers is to improve search on our MSDN site. I am happy to announce today we are launching the beta of a vastly improved search with three new capabilities. You can try it at the Visual Studio Developer Center.

What is new?

The feature I am more excited about is Codezone search, because this is a project my team has been working on for over a year now. Today the MSDN site becomes a more powerful resource for developers worldwide by combining the resources from our library of over 1 million documents with the best community resources. When searching in MSDN online developers will find a tab with aggregated results from our Codezone community partners including articles and code samples from sites like DotNetJunkies, ASPItalia, ElGuille, Developpez.com and AILight.jp.

Enabling the community search through Codezone on MSDN is an important milestone that enables us to combine our resources with those of the community and establishes a new level of collaboration with our community partners, who complement our technical resources with practical information in many languages. Give it a try!



Next is Forum Search - MSDN Search now integrates search of MSDN Forums, giving you access to tens of thousands of answered questions about developing with the Microsoft platform, as well as an easy way to ask a new question if you can’t find answers you need. You can also find resources from MSDN Forums within Visual Studio 2005 itself (and SQL Server 2005) by using Help…Search and clicking on the 'Questions' tab!

Last, but not least is Improved Relevance for MSDN Online searches – the search engine now learns prom previous searches using some advanced back-end analytics, so the relevance and usefulness of the results will improve every day.

I am very excited as this is an improvement that will help millions of developers who visit MSDN every month. If you like it (or not) or if you have any comments send me a line.