Cool Client Stuff : Windows Live

Search Macros V2 is Live!

rprabhu — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 20:48:00 GMT

As some of you must have noticed, the new Live Search shipped a couple of weeks back, and last week, became the service that replaces what used to be MSN Search as well. The new service offers a bunch of improvements and new features over both MSN Search and the earlier beta search experience on Live.com. Read this post on the Live Search blog for a summary of what's new.

I specifically want to highlight one of the features in Live Search - Search Macros. If you haven't heard about search macros before, please read my earlier post on the topic, but essentially, it is a way you, as a user, can create your own custom search engine and share it with other users.

In the earlier incarnation of search on Live.com, we offered a beta version of Search Macros that offered a basic experience to create, share and use macros. In the new Live Search, however, you will notice a whole new, vastly improved user experience for this feature. Here are some of the highlights:

1) First of all, there is an easy to remember start page where you can go to get, um, started. You can also get to this from the Live Search results pages by clicking 'More' on the scope bar and selecting 'Edit Macros'.

2) You can now play with the feature and try to create some macros without first having to sign in (you need to sign in only when you are ready to save the macro). The new, wizard like experience to create macros is also very simple and quick to use.

3) You will notice there are now two modes for creating macros - a basic one and an advanced one. The basic one lets you quickly put together a list of sites that should be part of your macro. If your macro is a simple site filter, the basic experience is for you. If, on the other hand, you want to do more powerful customization and use our advanced search operators, you can use the advanced mode. The advanced mode lets you choose from a list of operators, and has a brief description and example for each one to help you get started with using it.

4) One of the cool new features is the 'Test Search' you will notice at the bottom of the page where you define your macro. This lets you quickly compare results from your macro to regular Live Search to test how your macro performs. You can then iteratively edit the macro definition till you like the results.

5) To save your macro, you need to sign in with a Windows Live ID (Passport) account. When you sign in, you will notice a clean new experience to manage your macros and Creator IDs (or namespaces). A Creator ID is something that associates the macro with you, and you can create multiple of these per passport account. For example, my ID is 'rvp', which stands for my full name.

6) Arguably the coolest new feature is the macro home page. For each macro you create, there is a customizable home page that you can bookmark and point friends and other folks to, to use your search engine. What's more, the home page has an easy to remember URL, based on the name of the macro and the Creator ID associated with it. For example, I wrote a macro suited to developers working on the Microsoft platform to search for documentation, samples etc. Its called 'mscoding' and the url is simply:

http://search.live.com/macros/rvp/mscoding

Simple, easy to remember and small!

7) You can find macros that people have chosen to share at the Windows Live Gallery site. Here you can browse through macros by their tags or search for them directly in the search box. You can also find details of the macro, like its definition and description. Adding your own macro here is also easy, and the creation wizard I mentioned earlier will offer you an opportunity to do so.

8) You can find links to the creation page and the gallery from the Live Search results page under the 'More' scope. Also, when you use a macro (or other scope like Video), it will automatically show up in your scope bar, so you can use it again easily next time. That portion of the scope bar is a dynamic, 'most recently used' scopes list, so it will automatically feature the scopes/macros you use most often.

So try the feature out and let us know what you think! Your feedback will be very useful for future iterations of Search Macros, as we continually improve and incorporate new ideas!

Update: Zachary has posted a nice description of the macros v2 release on the Live Search team blog.

MIX06 sessions available online

rprabhu — Fri, 12 May 2006 12:28:00 GMT

In case you missed this announcement - videos of all the MIX06 sessions, including Bill Gates' keynote, have been made available online. If you missed the conference, you may find it interesting to view a few of the sessions. Specifically, here is a link to Mez's breakout session on one of my favorite Windows Live Search features, Search Macros.

Busy week for Windows Live!

rprabhu — Fri, 05 May 2006 11:22:00 GMT

Wow, lots of Windows Live related news this week:

1) The live.com team released an update just a few hours ago. Great to see they have addressed some of the top complaints/feature requests! My own favorites are (1) when you issue a search from the toolbar or browser search box, you no longer have to wait for the live.com home page to load (that was annoying!), (2) individual gadgets can now be refreshed and (3) the weather gadget is now a much more reasonable size :-)

2) Microsoft adCenter was officially launched in the US.

3) Windows Live Shopping Beta was launched earlier in the week. You can also search for products through the 'Products' tab in Windows Live Search.

4) Amazon's a9 and Alexa switched to using Windows Live Search as the search provider!

Well, this is the just the beginning of what promises to be an interesting summer for Windows Live!

Windows Live Search - Macros

rprabhu — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 09:16:00 GMT

The Windows Live Search Beta launch yesterday gives me an opportunity to write my first post on search, since moving to the search team back in November.

This release has many highlights, including a new UI featuring infinite scroll and a snazzy new image search. Speaking of image search, the Image Search Gadget is really cool - it lets you search for images from right within your live.com homepage. (To try it out, just navigate to 'add stuff' -> Windows Live -> Image Search -> 'add' from the live.com homepage.) The reviews on the new UI seem to be mixed - a lot of people liked it in general, but had some issues with the performance, unusual scroll bar behavior etc. Well, I know the UI team is eager to hear your feedback, so if you have any, leave a comment here and I will pass it on. You can also leave your feedback on the team blog.

But the feature I wanted to write about today is something called Search Macros. Macros are search modifiers that can help you perform a more targeted or specific search. In some sense, they let you build your own search engine and share it with others.

In this release, you can chose from a set of existing macros (built by members of the search team and some ETech conference attendees) which you can find here. To try a macro, just click on the 'add to live.com' link/image you will find on its page. You can then pin the macro on your live.com scope bar, alongside the default scopes like web, news and images, to use anytime you do a search in the future.

But why would you want to use a macro? Here are a few scenarios where they can come in handy:

Narrow a search down - How many times did you wish you could restrict a search to only a few specific sites and not the whole web? Search engines provide operators to do this, but it is cumbersome to type a bunch of 'site:' every time. Instead, you could build a macro and use it to do the search whenever you want. The sidebargeek.windowslive macro is an example of this - it restricts the search to all the Windows Live related sites.
Targeted searching - Let's say you are looking for information about a term, say, RAID, as in, RAID disk array. A regular web search for such a common word can give you a lot of unrelated results. What if you could tell the search engine that you are doing a reference search here? Well, the livesearch.reference has some modifiers that do just that. The very first link when you search for 'raid' with this macro is the wikipedia page for RAID! On the other hand, if you are a CS researcher looking to find the latest publications on RAID, you can use the livesearch.csresearch macro instead.
Bring advanced search to the average user - Very few people actually use advanced search operators on search engines. For example, take a look at the livesearch.homepages macro. It uses an ingenious combination of modifiers that let you find people's homepages, but it is highly unlikely an average user is going to build something like that! Well, with macros, they don't have to - they can just use what someone else has built ;-) Imagine the next time your dad asks you for help with a computer problem ("I searched for it but couldn't find anything!"), and you just hand him a macro called, say, john.dadsupport, that is targeted to the set of sites or has the right keywords he can use to find support information!
Make use of community knowledge - Even if you are an expert searcher, I am sure there have been times when you have had to try and retry several combinations of keywords to find what you want. For example, let's say you are a new dad or mom, and want to look up something about a baby's sleeping habits. You could do a regular search, but where do you start and how do you know which results to trust? After all, you don't know which websites are the authorities in parenting. But you know what, someone else probably does! Sure enough, you browse through the gadgets site and find a macro called livesearch.parenting that should be useful. This is generally true of anything you are looking for - someone else probably knows where/how to look for a given topic better than you, since they have been through it or are experts in that area. Macros help to leverage this community knowledge in search. Similarly, it lets you share your expertise with others.
Save away useful search parameters for future use - Lets say you were searching for reviews on digital cameras. I am sure you would have tried a variety of keyword combinations ('digital camera reviews', '"digital camera" review', 'best digital cameras' and so on) before you hit the 'right' one. A few months later, you might try the same search again, but now you have forgotten the right combination - d'oh! With macros, you can just save the query as a macro and use it in future, or share it with friends.

So I think macros are simple, yet powerful tools - try some out and see what you think! We will be adding the ability to create macros very soon, so do check back (I will blog about it as well)!

Lots of people have been talking about this feature in the blogosphere. If you have a comment, feel free to leave it here or better yet, blog about it!