MSDN & TechNet Search Blog : live 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

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.