MSDN & TechNet Search Blog : Search Technology

Improved Indexing

jandrick — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:43:00 GMT

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.

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.

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.