Improved Indexing

For the past year, we’ve seen large improvements in relevance and indexing from Live Search—the new, more relevant search engine which powers search on MSN, Microsoft.com, MSDN, TechNet, and inside Visual Studio 2005’s Online Search feature.  But we have still faced an embarrassing problem: some of the most important technical content on Microsoft.com has been missing from Live Search.  For example, until recently large numbers of Knowledge Base articles were not indexed, and queries for many Win32 APIs on MSDN returned zero results.

We have been working with the Windows Live Search team to resolve this problem—both by making our content easier for crawlers to find, as well as by improving Live Search to better crawl large sites like MSDN or support.microsoft.com.

I’m pleased to report that we have made dramatic improvements! The Support Knowledge Base, MSDN Library, Microsoft.com Downloads, and MSDN/TechNet Forums are very near being fully indexed.  Ultimately, you all will be judges of how this has improved your search experience so do send us feedback!

In addition to indexing, there other search problems we’re tracking down and resolving—for example the problem of missing Titles and Descriptions for MSDN Library results will be resolved soon.  And there are other upcoming feature improvements in MSDN & TechNet online search, including Product/Technology filtering, Auto-Complete of search queries, and more.  Stay tuned to http://blogs.msdn.com/msdnsearchblog/ for the latest info.