MSDN & TechNet Search Blog : MSDN Search

Some cool toys to play with...

jandrick — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 08:59:00 GMT

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.

MSDN and TechNet are getting a search update!

jandrick — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:47:00 GMT

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

Welcome Microsoft MVPs!

jandrick — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:17:00 GMT

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!

PROTOTYPE: New features and Experience

jandrick — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 19:46:00 GMT

Several months ago I promised we would listen and make changes to the search site as you provided feedback. In the last two months since we launched the current search, we have been listening to your feedback and we are working to improve a few more things. If you saw the MSDN TV article you may have seen a demo I showed on the tha "advanced search UI".

We are still examining implementations, but I would like to introduce for your consideration, our first iteration of the these features. You can see the search and play with it at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/search/refinement.aspx. The features included are:

More content!
Exact Match
Narrow by Site
Narrow by Category
Cleaned up interface

One of the first things you may notice it no more tabs. We removed the tabs because we heard from you that you didn't see them. But we also heard you wanted the content, so we combined the content into the base query and you can filter out the content you don't want. For example, if you are searching for a term like ATLAS, you can remove the blogs sites from the results.

Additionally, It is important to remember because we built on the MSN, you have the ability to build your own query with the MSN query language! The language works this way:

Operation	Syntax	Examples
All Terms	term1 AND term2 term1 & term2 term1 term2	Console AND WriteLine Console & WriteLine Console WriteLine
Any Terms	term1 OR term2 term1 \| term2	Word OR Excel Word \| Excel
Exclude	term1 -term2	FindWindow -CE
Group	(term1 term2)	FindWindow AND (CE OR MFC)
Exact Phrase	"phrase"	"Provider Toolkit"
Preference	prefer:[op]term2	FindWindow prefer:MFC

So play, have fun, and let us know what you like and don’t like. We are working on a few more features including; Narrow by Product, Narrow by Keyword, Text Suggestion, and more. You can influence this process. If something is not working let me know the query you tried, and what is the nature of the topic you are looking for. We appreciate your feedback and hope to hear from you soon.

MSDN Search powered by MSN - v1 Review and Next Steps

stephbu — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 09:46:00 GMT

The Search team is just coming to the end of our 1st production development cycle with the new codebase. After a dozen or so public builds and plenty of feedback, the project has been signed off for production.

It'll take a few days to get the release management stars in alignment, but the code is locked and loaded. The code is currently live in the Lab (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/search), I'll post the live URL later in the week.

Highlights of this release include:

Powered by MSN Search - all tabs except Codezone use MSN Search technologies for better relevance and performance. While superficially this seems like a small thing, this is an enabler for a whole slew of ideas we've got for our next iterations. This iteration also adds support for MSN's complex query syntax
Can switch back and forth between Microsoft and community results with one click without leaving the search page
MSDN Forums, with 10,000's of answered questions & an active community generating new answers every day.
Codezone Premiere Sites, the best 3rd-party sites for articles & samples targeting the Microsoft developer platform
Simpler UI which aligns well with Visual Studio 2005's own search UI
OpenSearch - some nifty code to integrate MSDN into IE7, or leverage our search results on other sites.
RSS - track developer hot topics on MSDN through your RSS Reader.

Looking to the future, we'll keep the lab going. We've had a lot of feedback browser compatibility - in coming iterations we're looking at:

Improving site "crawlability". Will help search crawlers get much deeper into the site, reduce duplicate links, and eliminate those sporadic "d=robots" results.
Full XHTML 1.0 Compliance, better support on all browsers that our developers use and no-scripting scenarios for more constrained corporate policies. (yes that does mean Firefox and Opera)
Globalized Language support.
"Search From Here" - e.g. all documents that refer to XmlDocument in the System.Xml namespace.
Filtering Results. Different ways to slice and dice results.
Technet Support

As developers we've got our own favourites in this list, how would you prioritize this list, what have we missed?

OpenSearch post on IE7 blog

jandrick — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 20:13:00 GMT

For those of you interested in more information on how IE7 takes advantage of OpenSearch check out the post on the IE7 Blog about opensearch.

There is also a discussion thread that is providing some great feedback for us on channel9. If you haven't been, please take a moment. Give us some feedback or join the discussion

Updated: Search beta on MSN

jandrick — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 06:45:00 GMT

Great news today! Thanks to the dedicated work of my team here at MSDN. We have released a update to the search beta site. This update includes the following improvements.

MSN based search results
Codezone and Forums Searches
MSDN Blogs search

We also included a great new feature for those of you who are using IE7 or other supported browsers. We now offer OpenSearch Integration. OpenSearch is a format for sharing search. Other tools can then read those search results. In IE7 a user can add the search to the default search tool.

Please go to the site (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/searchbeta), try it out. Give us feedback. In the next few weeks we will be releasing the changes site wide on MSDN.