Bill Gates kicked off the MIX 06 conference today in Las Vegas with his keynote. Some of the goodies announced today were a new build of IE7, the release of Atlas and a new Windows Live developer center.

Well, the conference has just started - look for more announcements and goodies later this week! There are quite a few interesting sessions. Here are a couple of search related ones:

NGW044 - Build Your Own Search Engine
Speaker(s): Jeff Barr (Amazon)
Focus(s): Business Decision Maker, Developer
Session Type(s): Breakout
Amazon subsidiary Alexa.com is leveling the search playing field. For the first time, developers looking to build the next "big thing" in search or an ultra custom search engine have access to the 300 terabytes of Alexa crawl data, along with the utilities to search, process, and publish their own custom subset of the data-all at a reasonable price. Developers no longer need a million dollar budget or to reinvent the wheel designing search algorithms, to be able to build their own search engines or create customized Web services based on data from the Alexa crawl. As a full-service Web analysis and Web service publication platform, the Alexa Web Search Platform should allow any user with an Internet connection to access Web content on a large scale and provide new services or applications to the online community. Jeff Barr provides an overview of the Alexa API and shows developers and designers how to get on the new, leveled search playing field.
 
NGW056 - Windows Live Search Macros – Build, Share, and Use Your Own Search Engine in Seconds!
Speaker(s): Ramez Naam
Focus(s): Developer
Session Type(s): Breakout
Windows Live Search includes the power of Search Macros - custom search engines that can be created in seconds and that can powerfully alter the search results. Learn how to create these custom search engines, how to use them with a single click from within Windows Live Search, how to share them with others, and how to integrate them with search boxes and search results on your site.