Released: Improved Search Autocomplete, and more

justingrant — Wed, 28 May 2008 08:16:00 GMT

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.

MSDN & TechNet Search Blog : autocomplete

Released: Improved Search Autocomplete, and more