venkatna's (Venkat Narayanan's) WebLog

One freakin' game

2008-10-05T09:09:46Z

Is it too much to ask? Win one freaking game. Best record in the NL, second best record in all of baseball, and what do they do in the NLDS? Lose three straight. The one good thing, maybe, is they successfully completed 100 years without a title.

I was not going to talk about the Cubs until the World Series, but now there is no need for it, is there? This sucks.

- Venkat

Olympics and MSN/Live Search

2008-08-16T03:05:09Z

Like a lot of people, I have been watching a lot of Olympics recently, and have really enjoyed it. I cannot quite put my finger on why, but I have been excited by the Olympics. This has also led me to augment my TV viewing with other sources of information. I found out that Microsoft has done quite a bit of work on the Olympics. Just look at all this stuff:

- www.nbcolympics.com - You can watch hours and hours of video, athlete profiles, current results, schedules and much more. This is a great site. The videos over Silverlight are awesome.

- NBC Olympics on media center - this is another awesome resource which basically has the same videos as on www.nbcolympics.com, but they are downloaded to your media center.

- Live Search answers: Live Search has a whole bunch of instant answers.

* Medal Count
* Medal Count by Country
* Medal Count by Sport
* Medal Count by Country and Sport
* Athletes

- Live Search Homepage - www.live.com has had pictures from the Olympics as the background every day (2 pictures a day). [Full Disclosure: I work on this, and am part of the group that selects the pictures every day. I also work on Search UX, but not directly on the answers]

- Venkat

300,000 servers in a container farm

2008-05-09T01:30:00Z

This is cool - Microsoft has 300,000 servers in a container farm in the Chicago Data Center. It has got to be hot in there. This kind of gives an idea to the pace of growth at Microsoft. Exciting times.

Venkat

Live Search at the Daytona Endurance Race

2008-01-23T05:31:30Z

I am a huge fan of Formula 1 racing, and don't follow races in the U.S. that much. However, I just found out that Live Search is sponsoring a car at the Daytona Motor Speedway for the 24 Hours of Daytona Endurance race. Turns out this is for a good cause. We are sponsoring Team Seattle, and they have a goal of raising $700,000 for Seattle's Children's Hospital. You can follow the progress of the Team Seattle Drivers, and find out how to support Team Seattle, you can go to the Live Search Racing Space. Last year, the team raised $400,000. Please help the team reach their goal of $700,000.

Oh, and btw, the race will be televised on FOX starting at 10:00AM Saturday and then carried on SPEED Channel for the rest of the race.

They also have Bird's Eye views of different race tracks at http://livesearchracing.spaces.live.com/lists/cns!593B3B417C192DC6!106/.

- Venkat

Windows Home Server - Need to get me one of these

2007-12-07T05:34:14Z

I have been looking at getting the HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server. Right now, all my data is stored on one external hard disk. I would really like to not have to worry about backing up all of the photos and videos I have. That should all just happen. According to most of the reviews i have read, and people i have talked to, Windows Home Server does just that, and more. This definitely has the "wife approval factor".

BTW, it seems like Home Server also has a good marketing team. They have an awesome site at www.stayathomeserver.com and are producing some funny videos. Here are two:

Intro: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=965cfa66-0332-476f-8b12-e904a6ed3612

Home Sweet Server?: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=601ae5ee-daed-488e-8fb7-904274cbdcef

- Venkat

List of all Microsoft Team Blogs

2007-09-18T21:36:34Z

Brandon LeBlanc has gone to some trouble to get a list of all Microsoft Team Blogs in one location. This is a very useful list for any Microsoft watcher.

- Venkat

Speeding up Web 2.0 applications

2007-09-10T23:35:35Z

My experience with web 2.0 applications is limited to Live.com homepage (www.live.com) and Start.com. In my experience, start.com was generally faster than live.com. There are various reasons for this, but one of the main ones is the amount of JavaScript code we download. Start.com was a much smaller site compared to live.com. We also have some other cookie related features in live.com that slow it down a little bit.

The first release of live.com was very slow. We improved it a whole lot by doing more processing on the server and actually rendering the basic blocks as html, instead of rendering everything using JS on the client side.

I read a paper today from Microsoft Research - Code Splitting for Network Bound Web 2.0 Applications that contains a lot of great information about splitting JS files so that we download only what we need. We applied some of those principles on live.com, but didn't nearly do enough. Chalk it up to experience, I guess :). Anyway, the point of this post is to point people to this paper. It is well worth a read, and we could all benefit from faster web applications.

- Venkat

Tafiti - Silverlight based Search Engine

2007-08-23T01:12:55Z

Microsoft has released a new experimental Search Engine at www.tafiti.com. This looks like it is more to show the power of Silverlight than to show off a new Search interface. And it really does that. It is very easy on the eyes and completely smooth. There is some interaction that I don't particularly enjoy. For example, if you search multiple times, a new "note" is added on the left column. However, you can only delete your most recent search and you cannot get to your previous search. I am not sure what this adds to the user experience. Also, I don't like the refine experience. I don't always refine searches by adding more keywords, and in this interface that is the only way for me to refine.

I do like the ability to store and tag results. I can store results from multiple result types (web, images, feeds, books) in the same tag. This is very useful for research.

And finally, the tree view. It looks cool, but unfortunately, I don't get it. It is a different perspective, but I cannot see how this adds to the user experience.

All in all, this site does what it was meant to do - show the power of Silverlight, and in the process, has given me something to think about regarding search engine behavior.

-Venkat

Windows Live starting to look better and better

2007-08-10T03:42:45Z

This is exciting. Windows Live, for a long time has been confusing for a lot of people. Sites did not look the same and they did not work well with one another. That seems to be changing now. More and more services seem like they were built together. And this morning Microsoft released two new Windows Live Services.

The first one, http://home.live.com is exactly what it sounds like. A central jumping off point for everything Windows Live. The page looks cool and seems to be quick. However, it seems to lack some basic functionality. If you have used the Live.com personalized homepage, you might remember home.live.com used to take you there. The personalized page still exists and as far as i know will continue to exist (I work on it, kinda :)). You can also access the personalized page at http://my.live.com.

The second service, Windows Live SkyDrive, is cool. I really like the name. I love the concept. I have two asks though. We only get 500 MB, that should really be higher. I would also like to see tighter integration with Foldershare. That would make this a killer service. [Note: I don't work with this team, and do not know what future plans are.]

We have also recently released new versions of WL Writer, WL Messenger, and WL Mail. And as Satya Nadella said in an interview recently, we are working on a new release of Search (and i am directly working on this :) ). I see fun things happening around Windows Live this year.

- Venkat

Performance of Web sites

2007-08-05T07:14:11Z

Yahoo Developer Network has a good post that details a number of things you can and should do to improve performance of your websites. Most of the recommendations are common sense, but together they pack a powerful punch. I have personally seen the bumps you get in performance whenever you implement one of these changes. The most bang for your buck is in minimizing the number of get requests. However, the one thing that i am iffy about is GZip compression, especially for JS. Compressing HTML and CSS usually result in better performance with no issues, but certain browsers seem to have issues with compressed JS. This has led to far too many problems in the sites i have worked on. However, with more people moving to newer browsers, it probably makes sense to compress JS files now. This also depends on the kind of traffic you get.

Crossroads Guitar Festival - on MSN

2007-07-28T07:45:14Z

People that know me, know i am a huge Blues fan. I am particularly fond of the guitar. My favorite artist is Eric Clapton. So when I see a concert that features Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Robert Randolph and Jimmie Vaughan, I usually want to visit. Unfortunately, this happens to be tomorrow, July 28, 2007, in Chicago.

I don't know how many of you have heard of the Crossroads Guitar Festival. The previous one was in Dallas (I believe in 2004). However, the concert sold out in 10 minutes, so I probably would not have found tickets anyway.

However, and here is the good news (that I kinda gave away in the title :) ) is that MSN has got my back. They are broadcasting this concert live. After the successful Live Earth concert, I am sure they will do a good job this time as well.

Cannot wait to watch this. I also hope they have recorded versions.

- Venkat

MSN Health and Fitness gets cool new dashboard on Search results

2007-07-12T00:46:25Z

It seems like Microsoft is putting the Medstory acquisition to good use. MSN Health and Fitness now uses Medstory technology for Search results. When you search, you get results with a cool dashboard on top. This dashboard has categories and related terms in those categories. You find the usual terms you expect to see, and then some you don't expect. To me that is the value. The serendipitous nature of discovering related terms is extremely valuable and one that you do not usually find in a search engine. You usually find information about exactly what you are looking for, but not related important information.

Let me demonstrate. Say your query term is pregnancy. This is what the results look like.

In the related topics section, you find expected terms like prenatal care and pregnancy tests. That is good. However, you also find terms like Fish Oil. Clicking on that leads you to realize taking Fish Oil when you are pregnant leads to better hand-eye coordination for the child. Related, important information that you normally would not find without a lot of searching.

Color me impressed.

- Venkat

Keyword Suggestion Platform getting great reviews

2007-06-16T08:56:00Z

Looks like the Microsoft Ad Lab research center folks have been busy. They released a new Keyword Suggestion Platform that seems to be off to a good start. It seems to be getting some good reviews - here is one by Jorie Waterman of iCrossing. It is definitely nice to see our Ad platform get some good comments. :)

- Venkat

Halo 3

2007-06-16T00:13:00Z

Halo 3 marketing starts - http://www.halo3.com. This should be fun to follow.

- Venkat

PopFly and Live Search

2007-06-16T00:02:00Z

PopFly now has blocks for Live Search. These are what are available now:

Block	Description
Live Search	Retrieve web results from Live Search
Live Image Search	Retrieve images from Live Image Search
Live News	Retrieve news articles from Live News Search
Phonebook	Look up Yellow pages and Residential entries in Live Search Phonebook
Live Ads	Retrieve contextual ads for any query
Live Spell Checker	Get spelling suggestions from the Search speller

There are also blocks for Live Spaces, and other MSN / Live Properties. Good Stuff.

- Venkat