"Brilliant" MSDN Search
When people learn that I work on MSDN and TechNet, one of the first things I hear is that our Search solution is really terrible. The best way to find something on our sites, they say, is to use Google.
A year ago I would have agreed, but now I’m proud to be able to tell people that we’ve been updating Search over the past year, and they should really take another look.
I had a fun experience last night that illustrates just how far we have come. Tim and Drew, developer friends from Brisbane, Australia are in town and came over to my place to hang out. We yakked about all the normal stuff—families, politics, American accents—but as web guys, we ended up talking shop a lot.
I proudly demoed our new forums and bookmarks applications, and they were duly impressed, but one of them said, “You know what I really can’t stand about MSDN? It’s the search—it’s just terrible. I just use Google.”
Well, this was a great opportunity, so I said, “When’s the last time you used MSDN search?” They both said they had given up on it a year or two ago, so I said, “Check this out…” and proceeded to show off our new Search app, focusing especially on refinements and auto-complete.
“Wow, that’s pretty interesting,” said Drew, “but let me see how it works on something I really care about—try search for the Win32 CreateWindow function—I use it all the time.” I did as he asked, typing only “create” into the search box before “createwindow” showed up as the fourth item, then a “w” so it was first. Selecting it and pressing enter, Drew was pleased to see CreateWindow() show up as the first item in the results list. He also like that there was a “Win32” refinement so he could narrow the results to Win32 content only.
“This is great.” Growing ambitious, Tim added, “What really pisses me off about Google is how it strips out all punctuation, which is vital when searching for programming terms.” He asked me to search for the XmlDocument.CreateElement method. “It would be really great if you search supports periods.”
I typed “xmldocument” and Timsaw a bunch of autocomplete terms with “dots” in them. “This looks promising--I'm ecstatic,” he said. I typed a couple more characters to get “xmldocument.c” and “xmldocument.createelement” was listed as the second item. I selected it and the results came back with all the different versions XmlDocument.CreateElement() listed first.
“This is absolutely brilliant,” said Tim. “This is exactly the stuff I was searching for today. I’ll definitely start using MSDN search again.”
For someone who five minutes earlier was saying that MSDN search is not any good, this was a great transformation to see.
