We just released an update to MSDN Search and TechNet Search with many of improvements!  Here's what's new:

• Improved Performance
• Matching refinements listed under each search result
• MSDN Code Search Preview
• Easier to expand searches to "Entire Web" / Microsoft.com
• Include English Results
• What Else?
  

Improved Performance

This release has over 1/3 fewer HTTP requests and over 15% reduction in bytes on the wire, plus improved caching for faster performance. Response time, especially outside the US, will improve significantly.  Users in Asia may see response time drop in half!

Matching refinements listed under each search result

Now, each result lists the refinements which apply to that result. In practice, this means you'll know what product and technology each result refers to. For example, searching for select on MSDN shows that the first result is from the Win32 and COM library, the second is the HTML documentation, and the third is in the Excel Knowledge Base.  

This works for versions too, for example, try searching for SELECT Examples.  Note that even though there are pages for SQL 2000, SQL 2005, and SQL 2008, you can easily tell them apart by looking underneath each result.

And if you want to see only results for that product or version, just click on one of the "related to" items-- they're live links which will apply that refinement to your search.

MSDN Code Search Preview

The Code Search Preview button takes you to a results page on http://msdn.krugle.com/, which is a new site we've partnered with Krugle.com to build for searching code on MSDN. It's still a work in progress (hence the "preview") but for now it lets you search code snippets inside the MSDN Library. We're working on putting more code in there (e.g. code in forums, from codeplex.com, etc.) in future releases.

For example, here's a screenshot of code search results I might use when searching for code for a custom Visual Studio debugger visualizer.

Easier to expand searches to "Entire Web" / Microsoft.com

With one click, without having to go to another page or search engine, you can now expand your search to the Entire Web or to all of Microsoft.com. Just click one of the links above the search box. One click gets you right back to where you started. For example, here's a search for CSS rounded corners.

Here's the same search after you click Entire Web: 

This is a great way to quickly see what else is out there before deciding to try another search on MSDN & TechNet. Note that refinements are disabled in Entire Web mode because we don't know which sites out on the internet relate to which technologies-- but when you switch back to MSDN or TechNet search, your old refinements are still intact.

"Include English Results" checkbox

This lets you decide, if you're searching in a non-English langauge, whether to show only your language's results, or also include English results too.  This lets you add or remove English (and go back again) with a single click. For example, here's a Spanish-only search for messagebox, refined to Visual Studio 2008 and the Support Knowledge Base.

And here's the same search after you click the checkbox (to the right side of the search box) to include English results

Remember you can flip back to with one click.

What else?

There are a few other minor improvements:

• Refinements are now sorted in a more relevant way, so a refinement with only a few matching results (but they are near the top of the search results list) will show up higher in the refinements list too.
• OpenSearch (the "add MSDN/Technet Search to your browser") link on each results page now works on Firefox too.

Hope you like the changes, and let us know what you think. We just opened a new MSDN/TechNet Search Feedback Forum which is a great place for your feedback.

Thanks again,

the MSDN & TechNet team

Last week I was at the Microsoft TechEd Developer Conference in Orlando.  It was a great chance to talk with a lot developers about MSDN Search, to get feedback, and to show off what we've been working on with autocomplete, refinements, and more. Here's a summary of what I heard:

• MSDN Website Search is improving.  It was nice to hear lots of positive feedback about recent search improvements. Admittedly, expectations were pretty low given problems in the past, but hearing positive things from users of Search is a welcome change.
• Need to make search results clearer. I heard lots complaints about how hard it was to know, from looking at a search result, what it relates to.  This is particularly problematic between different versions of the same product, or when APIs have the same name (e.g. Button) in different namespaces or classes, but search result titles don't make the difference clear enough.
• Need to fix search in Visual Studio.  I also heard lots of complaints about the Visual Studio IDE search experience. One typical example: "Great, the website search experience better, but most of the time I'm inside Visual Studio-- why can't you make that better too so I don't have to go to the website to get good search?" Good question... and something we're looking into. :-)

The primary developer who works on MSDN & TechNet search, Tim Shakarian, was there at TechEd too.  Together, we recorded a short webcast video: What's New with Search on MSDN and TechNet  In the video we talk about some of the features of search, show a quick demo, and talk about how Search works under the covers. Finally, I briefly touch a few upcoming changes planned for search.

Anyway, hope you like the video, and keep sending us feedback (either via blog comments or via the feedback form http://blogs.msdn.com/msdnsearchblog/contact.aspx) about specific features you'd like to see or problems you find. For bug reports, remember to include the URL of the search results page where you found the problem, and the specific search query you were using. Thanks!

Today we released a bunch of improvements to MSDN Search, TechNet Search, and Expression Search. The big change is a huge improvement in autocomplete-- from about 30,000 terms to over 2.4 million terms.  In practical terms, this means you're at least twice as likely to get a completion when you're typing a search term, and the number of completions you see will be much longer.

For example, typing "asp.net sec" yesterday on MSDN Search would have given you only one completion: "asp.net security".  Today you see 10 completions, e.g. "asp.net security model", "asp.net security checklist", etc. It's a cool effect-- you can show up at search even if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for, and know that autocomplete can help you find a good queries.

Note that we haven't improved the autocomplete in the masthead of msdn.microsoft.com and technet.microsoft.com pages yet-- for now the 2.4M-term enhanced autocomplete is only on search results pages. But we're working now on deploying it sitewide in the next month or two so you'll get the better autocomplete everywhere.

Other search changes released today include:

• Removed those annoying "500 Internal Server Error" results which have shown up since msdn.microsoft.com was migrated over from msdn2.microsoft.com several weeks ago.
• Support for lots more languages, which makes searches from many languages (and English searches from the UK and India) better. For example, here's a search in French for ASP.NET Sécurité or Web Development in Czech (Vývoj webových aplikací)
• Added autocomplete to the search in the masthead of http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com, http://forums.technet.microsoft.com, and http://forums.expression.microsoft.com 
• Improved Expression Search to cover more Expression-related sites
• Improved performance around 2x when entering a new search query on the search results page
• Fixed the broken search box in the left-hand pane of Technet pages on www.microsoft.com, like the TechNet Events & Errors Message Center.
• Various bug fixes

We're still mopping up a few problems after launch, so let me know if you see any problems and we'll try to fix 'em.

Also, sorry I haven't been blogging recently about search. I've got a new baby at home, so life has been pretty hectic these past few months. Anyway, thanks for using MSDN/TechNet/Expression Search, and let me know what you think of the new release.

P.S. - In addition to search updates, a few other cool things launched today including: a Forums Update, a preview of Social Bookmarking features on our sites, improvements to the user profile page, and more.

This release was driven by customer requests, usability testing, and gap analysis of existing Search features, resulting in three primary search improvements:

·         Make refining searches easier and more usable

·         Improve relevance of auto-complete

·         Globalize all search features and add more locales

Details are below, but here’s a few examples:

·         MSDN Search for MessageBox in Korean, refined to only .NET-related results

·         TechNet Search for groupwise migration refined to Knowledgebase & Forums (only) for Exchange (only).

The Search 3.0 release includes:

·         Make refining searches easier and more usable

o    Multiple refinements can be applied at once, enabling searches like “search only Exchange KB” or “search only SQL Forums”

o    Refinements now categorized into topics (e.g. SQL, BizTalk) and sources (forums, blogs, etc.)

o    Refinements now “stick” so they’re not lost when you change query terms

o    More discoverable UI for viewing & removing currently-applied refinements

o    More compact refinements display saves valuable screen real estate

o    Knowledge Base articles included in each product’s refined results

o    More accurate refinements, including updates for the latest “2008” wave of developer products

·         Improve relevance of auto-complete

o    Completions are now sorted to put most popular completions first

o    Scalability improvements mean over 3x more terms are supported. More terms = more completions (and more relevant completions!)

o    Autocomplete matches words inside queries (e.g. Console.WriteLine), not only “starts with” matches

o    Autocomplete terms are now specific to brand (MSDN vs. TechNet) and language

o    NOTE: these autocomplete improvements are on search results pages today. Extending them to search boxes on msdn2.microsoft.com and technet.microsoft.com is planned for the next couple of months.

·         Globalize all search features and add Terra Lite locales

o   Over 20 languages supported (not all exposed in UI yet), and across many more locales via fallbacks to closest language (e.g. es-mx falls back to es-es)

o    Localized refinement names (note the refinements in the Korean example above)

o    Autocomplete for Non-English languages

You may have noticed we went live tonight with a new MSDN/TechNet search. There's lots to talk about, but given that it's Valentine's Day today, I'm going to leave this at "stay tuned" for now :)

Justin Grant or myself (Chris Slemp) will give you the gory details tomorrow.

PS - there are a couple known issues with localized versions of search that we're working out.

Last week we release a major update to our search tool.   We shipped a new version based on the Labs prototype that we launched last spring. This release is full of features that were influenced heavily by YOU! Your feedback, all the emails and comments resulted in the features we chose to ship.   Try it and let us know what you think,  I think you will love the improved performance and better results.

Try it for yourself!

http://search.technet.microsoft.com/search/

http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/

Features and Enhancements:

Live Search Integration - The Live® Search Web Service has been improved over the last year, this release enables us to take advantage of features included in the web service today, but will also allow us to take advantage of new features in the future by reducing the complexity of our integration with Live.

Expanded Content -  In this release we allow customers to search a wide range of sites for Developer and IT Pro content allowing the user to expand the query to the entire internet.

Refinements and Pre-scoping -  You now have the ability to narrow or broaden their searches based on products or technologies as well as categories and sources of content.

Auto-complete (English only) -  In an effort to reduce misspelled or incorrect queries, customers will be able to have query terms suggested to them which they can select and search on.

Globalized Search -  In this release, customers will have the ability to search in ten languages Korean, Japanese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, German and French.

Language Switching -  To provide as much content to our global users as possible users can change the language of the results.  This lets a user stay in their native locale but see the results from another language.

What’s next:

·              In the next few weeks we will be turning on pre-scoping in our user interface which will allow people to narrow their search from the homepage or from any page in the coming centers.

·               Additional languages:  in the future we hope to extend our global search experience to additional locales

·              In future releases we will add Auto-Complete for non-English sites; We will be looking into creating a equivalent experience for our non-English customers.

If you are a user of Windows Vista there is a really cool Gadget which searches MSDN and provides results in the Gadget.  It was developed by Nikhil Kothari whose blog is at http://www.nikhilk.net/.  I will letg you read his post about it.   I think it is pretty cool Play with it and provide him some feedback. You can read about it here: http://www.nikhilk.net/SidebarGadgets.aspx

MSN Mobile Beta site. 

If you have a Cellular plan that allows you to surf the web you need to take a look at http://beta.mobile.msn.com.  No matter what your form factor or browser this site reads well and is super fast.   You can get news sports or financial information.  I love it.  The NCAA Hockey Tournament is going on right now and I am able to get the scores from Fox sports on MSN.   Super cool stuff.

So a few months ago we began the planning for an improved version of the search we provide on MSDN and TechNet.  We collected all the feedback we could from the current experience and the feedback from our most recent labs prototype and integrated them into a new design.  The new search incorporates numerous requested features and some others that we feel will help you find what your looking for.

 This next release scheduled to begin in Mid-April will include:

• Improved coverage and performance from the Live Search SOAP API
• Contextual refinment capability
• More Content
• Simplified UI (No tabs)

In the coming months following this release we will be turning on a couple of other cool features that we hope you will find useful; Autocomplete and Pre-scoping.   The Autocomplete feature works by pulling common terms from our lexicon as you type them. We hope this will help you to avoid misspelling and/or improve your ability find the term that will best locate the content you are looking for.   The prescoping feature offers the ability narrow your search to the section of the MSDN or Technet Site you are visiting.  

In the works

We have a few new cool things in the works that I would like to share, but I can't today.  I just want to let you know your feedback has been awesome and we are working hard to offer some big steps in the right direction.

 Thanks

This week we are hosting the 2007 Global MVP Summit here on the Microsoft Campus.   I want to thank all of you who attended the session on VB Help documentation.    I look forward to hearing from and corresponding with you about how we can make Microsoft's products better.   I will be posting some of the feedback I recieved later today.   For more information on the MVP Summit visit http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/MVPsummit

Thanks again!

This just a little note to first say thanks for all the feedback that you have all been sending me of late and I wanted to give you a heads up on some work that some of my co-workers have been doing in the area of discovery.

 Their blog is located at:  http://blogs.msdn.com/visual_collections/default.aspx

This is going to be wicked cool.  The tool they are working on is a visualization of the MSDN document set.  Combined with Microsoft Virtual Earth and the Live Search API, this concept is something else to see.  They just started blogging about it and I recomend a vist to the blog.  The tool will be online in labs soon, so check back often. 

I have some other cool news I will be anouncing in the next few weeks so subscribe to the blog so you don't miss out.

 Thanks!

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.

I was looking at the Q&A site on Windows live today.  There are lots of questions that could be found in TechNet Forum.  For example this question titled "Active directory (AD) and non exchange based EMail addresses" As a component of search, is this something that users would like see be a part of the MSDN and TechNet Sites?    I am curious, if as a extension of search would you benefit from a tool like this.  At MSDN and TechNet, we have strong audiences and I wonder if this is something that would be beneficial.  The guys at Search Engine Watch stated that they believe the "Question and Answer search engines are now the new hot social search thing."  What do you think?

We are in the process of updating our labs site where we are working on future innovations and current in-development projects.   The address is below:

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/v20/

Our old labs site will still be around until we decommission some older sites.  But you really have to go and check this out there is a really cool new project a world wide events control.  Check out the version with the integrated maps control.  It is wicked cool!   It is still very much a beta, but check it out and provide some feedback to the team. Their blog is here.

Search v2.0

We have moved the refinement UI to be our main labs experience.  We have improved the scoping functionality and updated the contingency design.  I am looking for feedback on the types of scopes that we have on the site.  For those of you coming from the TechNet Site, we would love to hear about the types of scopes you would like to see when we update the TechNet site.

Recently, we have had lots of questions around the differences between pure vanilla MSN search and the MSDN Search Site based on Windows Live.   The typical question is about why some content shows up in the MSN Search and not in the MSDN Search Site.   The explanation is actually very simple.  The MSDN search is based on a set of “Site:“ and other restrictions.   This  reduces the content down to developer related content.   When users are on MSN search and enter a term like “System.xml”  with the restriction “site:msdn.microsoft.com”  you are creating a query with only one portion of the query we use.   We have more qualifiers to prevent duplicates.  What we have found however is that we lose some content that we would like to have included.   For example when searching for the article How to transform a DataSet to spreadsheet XML for Excel by using Visual Basic .NET and ASP.NET  by searching for “How to transform a DataSet to spreadsheet XML for Excel by using Visual Basic .NET and ASP.NET.”  MSDN search today does not come up with it in the searches top 10. It is the fourth entry  on MSN search.   However, if you go to the new labs implementation (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/search/refinement.aspx) and enter the same long query name, the result is number one.  The difference is that the query structure is improved to contain more content. 

If you are searching for something on the main MSDN search site and you can’t find what you are looking for.  Try MSN or Labs implementation and let me know if you find it.  I will then make sure we add it to a list of content that needs to searched.  As always your feedback is welcome!

Thanks to everyone who has been submitting comments to the blog about the new search prototype.  I want to thank you for taking the time to suggest features or to offer scenarios that you are having trouble with.  I wanted to offer a little bit of transparency and process into how I deal with the comments.  First, I love criticism that is constructive and I love to post your complaints, concerns, and positive remarks, but because this is a very public blog sometimes (meaning a lot) we get spammed or we get out right hate mail.

I usually don't post these comments because they don't offer anything to the conversation and the spam is usually pretty lame.   So if you have feedback I will post it in the comments as long as it is the kind of comment that keeps the conversation going. Foul language, and other non-helpful language will not be posted.  I also want to thank everyone who has taken the time to subscribe to the blog. 

Your help has been instrumental in making improvements in this search experience!