Ask Mobile - Offers search for web sites, news, weather reports, pictures, stocks, maps and directions, people or products. Also has a dictionary search.
Lycos Mobile - Mobile search powered by Windows Live.
MSN Search - Microsoft provides search of the web, news, images and its own encyclopedia.
Meta Description: [ Find exactly what you are looking for – FAST! With Live Search. ]
Yahoo: Mobile - Yahoo mobile seach, news and services.
Today's news RSS feed
Live Search
Let your voice be heard livesearch Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:15:00 -0000 Elections document the will of the people, or at least the will of registered voters. On November 4th, you'll be asked to answer many questions, including who should be our next president, as well as questions at your state and local level.
Many blogs and analytical sites offer projections, comparisons to previous elections, and details about the issues and candidates themselves, including the MSN Election Guide. Those are great and important resources for informing your opinion.
But it's about the people's voice, right? And now you can search for what they're saying!
Live Search QnA represents the community's microphone and speaker, since the community asks and answers each other's questions. Links are encouraged to help prove or disprove a claim, and you can search through all the pre-existing question/answer threads over a range of topics. Michelle Slatalla, the New York Times journalist, reports on the rising phenomenon with her own recent experience in searching for (and finding) an answer to why her smoke alarms kept on beeping (answer: spider interference!).
And with the Democratic Convention finished and the Republican Convention underway, some of the most active political questions involve whether Senator Clinton's speech was sincere and supportive of Senator Obama, what people think of Senator McCain's Vice-Presidential pick, and whether the economy or national defense will be the driving factor. Whether you agree or disagree, join the community and express your opinion.
Let the community hear who you think is going to win and why!
Liam Ross, Senior Product Manager, Live Search Something's different at Live Search! livesearch Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:15:00 -0000 Whew, what a busy couple of weeks it's been. We launched our new home page back at the end of July with the goal of using a new picture each week. Then we decided to get a little crazy for the Olympics and rotate the images twice a day. About three days into the Olympics, we realized we just could not go back to one picture a week!
So a few days ago we shifted gears again. We're now giving you a new image every day, with hotspots to help spur your imagination. Sometimes we'll just show great pictures that we like; sometimes the images will be related to topical events, like the upcoming Labor Day holiday or NFL season kickoff.
We'll occasionally have images from the elections, but rest assured we'll be giving both parties equal time.
And if you don't like the picture you see today, don't worry – there will be a new one tomorrow!
– the Live Search Homepage team Get ready for SES 2008 livesearch Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:13:00 -0000 A quick note about my upcoming keynote at the Search Engine Strategies conference, Tuesday, August 19th at 9:00 am in San Jose. Kevin Ryan and the entire SES organization put on one of the best search conferences around. This year I have the privilege to present to more than 4,000 of you down in the Valley. Our large presence around the show will let us hear from all of you about our products and services and help us better understand the perspective that you bring to the show.
During my keynote on day two, I'll share with you our perspectives on how the search landscape has changed and how it will continue to evolve, based on key trends and our ability as an industry to react to them. I'll take you back in time a bit to talk about our early days of search marketing and look forward to the industry’s recent moves into semantic search. It’s an exciting time for us all as we begin to usher in a new phase of search that looks at how we can deliver a more intuitive user experience and a better ROI for advertisers. With these changes, I'll talk about how Microsoft is addressing and embracing this evolution. Specifically, I'll highlight some of the new product features, including Live Search cashback, which we unveiled at Advance08. I’ll also focus on how we think about building more open and sophisticated tools for advertisers and publishers, and show a few demos like our recently released Webmaster tools.
All of this, coupled with a Q&A session with Kevin Ryan, should make for a great opportunity to talk about how search is evolving and where Microsoft is headed.
I look forward to meeting many of you at another great SES San Jose conference. And please stop by our booth #309.
Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising
Where you can find us
Monday, August 18
9:45am-11:00am: Universal & Blended Search Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager, Live Search
11:15am-12:30pm: Semantic Search: How Will It Change Our Lives? Scott Prevost, General Manager and Director of Product, Powerset
2:45pm-4:00pm: Everything but Google: Alternative Search Advertising Options Mary Berk, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
Tuesday, August 19
9:00am-10:00am: Morning Keynote Satya Nadella, SVP, Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft
4:00pm-5:15pm: Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers Brian Cosgrove, Site-Side Analytics Engineer, AvenueA / Razorfish
We're also hosting a sponsored session, Diagnose SEO Issues Using Live Search Webmaster Tools, on Tuesday from 2:45pm-3:45pm. Speakers are:
Nathan Buggia, Program Manager Lead, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft
Andy Woods, Development Lead, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft
Ani Babaian, Senior Product Manager, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft
Wednesday, August 20
10:30am-11:45am: Building a Search Friendly Site William Flaiz, VP, Search Engine Optimization & Web Analytics, AvenueA / Razorfish
1:00pm-2:15pm: Searcher Behavior Research Update Pavan Lee, Research Manager, Microsoft
1:00pm-2:15pm: Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Matthew Gretzer, VP & Global Discipline Lead of Search Marketing, AvenueA / Razorfish
2:45pm-4:00pm: Keywords & Content: Search Marketing Foundations Jorie Waterman, Lead Program Manager, adCenter Keyword Research Platform
Thursday, August 21
10:15am-11:15am: Effective Contextual Search Management Dennis Buchheim, Sr. Director - Product Management, APS Networks, Microsoft
1:30pm-2:30pm: Organic Listings Forum Nathan Buggia, Program Manager Lead, Webmaster Center, Live Search
2:45pm-3:45pm: Site Clinic Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager, Webmaster Center, Live Search
2:45pm-3:45pm: In House SEO: Lessons learned & Victories Won Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect, Microsoft
Find out more about Microsoft's presence at SES in the Webmaster blog and the adCenter blog.
We're bringing the Olympics to you livesearch Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:14:00 -0000 Microsoft is into the Olympics in a big way through our partnership with NBC on NBCOlympics.com, the official online home of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing! And Live Search is ready to help you find everything you want during the games.
Feeling competitive? We’ve made it easy for you to find out if your country is ahead or behind – just search for “Olympic medals” and you'll get up-to-the-minute tallies by country:
Check it often to watch those medals add up!
If you just want to see a specific country or sport, you can do that, too. Try “Medals for Portugal” or “Medals for Swimming” and you'll get the latest counts as they happen:
It isn’t always about who is winning, although those heart-wrenching stories of hardship leading up to victory make some Olympians more popular than others. If you don’t want to be left out of the conversation over lunch, check out Olympic xRank. Not only will you know who is hotter than the torch but why.
On the other hand, if you hear an athlete’s name or want to find out why you keep seeing their face on your co-workers' monitors, try our Athlete Answer. Enter “Michael Phelps” and we give you everything you need in a neat little package:
Speaking of news, we’ve pulled it all together for you with our new Olympic News scope. We look for stories – articles and videos – across all the sources we can find and constantly provide the freshest, most relevant stories for you. If you just want to get right to the videos of the events and athletes try video search.
And we're not done! In our last blog post, we introduced you to our new homepage. It's gotten great reception and we wanted to do something special during the Olympics, so we'll be updating the image twice a day with great shots from the Games. Watch for it when the Olympics begin on 8/8/08.
We hope your team brings home the gold from Beijing!
Jacquelyn Krones - Senior Product Planner for Live Search
Improve your site's standing with new Webmaster tools livesearch Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:35:00 -0000 Today we are bringing our Webmaster Tools out of beta and releasing several new features that help webmasters see how Live Search crawls and indexes your sites. As a website owner, you can use these tools to improve your results on Live Search when a someone is looking for your site. The new Webmaster tools give you more data about referring links, identify issues Live Search encountered when crawling your site, and help you improve the overall indexing of your site. For the full story about this release, see the Webmaster Center Blog.
You can check out the new tools at http://webmaster.live.com/. And for questions, be sure to visit the Live Search Webmaster forums.
Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Center New home page helps you explore more on the Web livesearch Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:00:00 -0000 Today we're releasing an update to the Live Search home page that received positive feedback from customers in trials last month. The new design features background images that will change frequently, augmented with what we call "hotspots." These interactive areas highlight parts of the image and help you explore search results related to the highlighted area. Users who have tested this new home page have found it both engaging and a great place to start a search.
New images and hotspots
In our release last spring we laid the foundation for this page. In this home page release we've added background home page images that we'll change regularly and hotspots that click through to great search results. Hotspots gleam to the user when the page first loads then fade into the image. Users can discover them again by moving their mouse over them, revealing details about the image and a link to a related search result. To ensure that users can start a search immediately, our base page loads first with the images and hotspots loading quickly afterward. Users on a broadband connection may not notice the two steps. Today we're releasing the new home page in the U.S. only, with more markets to follow in the future.
A great place to start a search
Our goal for the home page is to find the best way to enhance users' sense of discovery, surprise, and delight while balancing engineering realities for a great user experience.
Extensive user research and exploration of many concepts with our customers pointed us in the direction for this design. We want the page to be a great place to start a search and also to intrigue and inform as well. We think hotspots will help users discover parts of Live Search they might not know while not distracting from the core purpose of the page — searching.
We think the new design is a great start, but there's more to come, with lots of interesting directions that we'll be exploring in our next releases of the home page.
Chris Rayner, Senior Product Manager, and Zach Gutt, Senior Program Manager Live Search User Experience team Powerset joins Live Search livesearch Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:30:00 -0000 We're excited to announce that we've reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company.
Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.
More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).
We're buying Powerset first and foremost because we're impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.
That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.
We know today that roughly a third of searches don't get answered on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. Two specific problems are the most common reasons for this:
Differences in phrasing or context between a user's search and the way the same information is expressed on webpages. Search engines don't understand today that "shrub" and "tree" are similar concepts. We don't understand that "cancer" sometimes refers to a disease and sometimes refers to a horoscope and when a query or a webpage refers to which.
Lack of clarity in the descriptions for each webpage in the search results. Sometimes a result looks relevant from its short description on the results page but turns out to be not so relevant when you visit the actual page. As a result, searchers frequently click results and then rapidly click back when they realize they aren't what they're looking for.
These problems exist because search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a webpage. We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a webpage. Doing so, we can innovate in the quality of the search results, in the flexibility with which searchers can phrase their queries, and in the search user experience. We will use knowledge extracted from webpages to improve the result descriptions and provide new tools to help customers search better.
Working with our existing Search team and other Microsoft teams that focus on natural language, Powerset will help us address all of those problems and opportunities.
We're looking to add even more talented engineers to the San Francisco team to accelerate our shared progress. If you're interested in joining the team, drop us a line.
We'll have more to say about the things we're doing in understanding searches and webpages through natural language technology in the coming months. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Powerset to Microsoft!
Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising
See also: Microsoft to acquire Powerset Live Search cashback now live on eBay livesearch Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:42:00 -0000 Now all of eBay's "Buy it Now" offers will be eligible for cashback rewards. With eBay's expansive catalog of products, from jewelry to electronics, you'll start to see more cashback ads appearing in our search results. That means more ways for you to save.
You'll see three primary differences between this user experience and other cashback user experiences:
There's an eBay ad with a cashback gleam (the cashback icon in the image here).
Instead of going into the Live Search cashback experience, you now go directly to the advertiser's website, which in this case is eBay.
The cashback gleam follows you throughout your eBay shopping experience. This is good continuity for the consumer and something we want to do more of, but it takes a bit of work on the advertiser side to enable this.
We want to learn from two experiences in the cashback program. Depending on customer and advertiser feedback, we'll make the necessary changes to deliver the best user experience over time.
Destination site experience This is the experience that went live last month. Consumers research a product category on Live Search and then click a Live Search cashback ad to head over to cashback for the best deal. We've had a lot of feedback that we should do a better job integrating our product research capabilities with our cashback experience. So we'll work hard to do that over the next few releases.
Direct-to-merchant experience The other experience we envisioned for cashback would integrate directly with advertisers from the search results page. In this experience, advertiser's ads will appear with a cashback gleam. When shoppers click the gleam in the ad, they head directly to the advertiser's site. Obviously, this streamlines a bit of the purchasing process but requires some custom development on the partner website to enable it. We took this approach with eBay and are exploring it with other advertisers as well.
We're excited to offer consumers more money-saving cashback rewards with eBay and look forward to hearing from you on how best to implement new features and functionality to the cashback experience.
Paul Dillon, Director, Commercial Search Helping you Search AND Give livesearch Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:00:00 -0000 One of the most exciting developments we've had in the last year was the success of our inaugural Search and Give program where your queries helped to raise more than $250,000 for local schools and non-profits. Over the course of the year the program generated cash donations for more than 20,000 organizations ranging from schools to non-profits such as Doctors Without Borders and ASPCA (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). Today we've launched the latest version of the program that includes a new, easy-to-use design with enhanced features and more flexible donation capabilities.
Here's how it works
By signing up at http://www.searchandgive.com/, consumers can start donating one cent per search to more than 100,000 schools and 900,000 non-profit organizations worldwide every time they use the Live Search to find whatever interests them. People can also convert tickets they've earned playing games on Microsoft's Live Search Club, at http://www.club.live.com/, into donations for those same schools or charities.
What's new
More money donated You can earn one cent per search for your designated charity by just looking for things online — up to 500 searches per person per month.
More than 1 million organizations We've grown our list of eligible organizations to more than one million. We've also made it easier to find them with a new UI that allows for faster lookup by name or non-profit ID number.
Watch your community grow Track your donations, total donations, and total number of contributors for your chosen organization.
Tell a friend Search and Give brings communities together around causes that are important to them. People can now send instant emails to friends and family from within the tool letting them know how they too can make a difference.
We need your help
This program is powered by people through word-of-mouth or viral distribution. We're asking for your help to make this program an even greater success by sharing this information with your friends and family and recruiting them to start searching at http://www.searchandgive.com. If one person can earn $60 per year for their favorite charity just by searching the Web with Search and Give, imagine the power of 10 people = $600 per year; imagine the power of 25 people = $1,500 per year; imagine the power of 100 people = $6000 per year. Together, we can make every search count.
In the end, we hope this program will grow exponentially so we can redistribute more of the dollars coming into search to the local schools and charities that YOU are passionate about supporting. We hope you enjoy the new features and stay tuned as we start showcasing some of the best "Search and Give" campaigns you all have created!
Christine Andrews, Product Manager, Search and Give
ACM Queue: Why Writing Your Own Search Engine is Hard - Anna Patterson explains the problems of search engine design in practical terms in this lengthy article.
Meta Description: [ - Why Writing Your Own Search Engine is Hard: So you have a grand idea; are you ready for the execution? ]
Amfibi - General search engine with an uncluttered interface in a choice of Catalan, English, French, and Spanish. Also has a web directory using the Open Directory.
Meta Description: [ General search engine which includes its own index of websites, a directory (provided by the Open Directory Project) and a meta search feature for searching multiple search engines at once. Also includes a free traffic exchange for webmasters. ]
Ask - Offers search for web sites, news, weather reports, pictures, stocks, maps and directions, people or products. Also has a dictionary search.
Commercial Alert Files Complaint Against Search Engines for Deceptive Ads - A complaint filed with the United States Federal Trade Commission by Ralph Nader's Commercial Alert service, which charges the major search engines of inserting advertisements in search engine results without clear disclosure that the ads are ads.
Creative Commons Search - Powered by Nutch, it searches content which can be re-used (for somes uses) without having to pay or ask permission.
Dumbfind - Offers the option to specify a general topic as well as specific keywords for more precise results.
Entireweb - The English-language version of a Swedish search engine with a clean interface and large database.
Meta Description: [ Entireweb makes searching easy with a user friendly search engine. ]
FactBites.com - A cross between a search engine and an encyclopedia. The results return complete, informative sentences about the search topic. Related topics are suggested.
FirstGov Search - The U.S. Government's official search engine. Find information from federal, state, local, tribal and territorial governments. Meta-search special government databases.
Gigablast - A search engine with a clean interface, advanced search options including sorting by date, and a real time url submission feature. Includes PDF documents in its index.
Meta Description: [ A powerful, new search engine that does real-time indexing. ]
500Infosniff - A simple search engine from Cybersoft Infotek with advertising.
Meta Description: [ Infosniff search engine allows you to search for your favourtie things at once,
returning the most comprehensive and relevant results fast. Unleash the power of Infosniff Search engine! ]
Mojeek - Search engine with a simple interface and no advertising.
MSN Search - Microsoft provides search of the web, news, images and its own encyclopedia, Encarta. Also offers desktop search via a toolbar.
Meta Description: [ Find exactly what you are looking for – FAST! With Live Search. ]
NPR : The Search Engine Wars - In a five-part series, NPR's Rick Karr takes a look at the business of search engines.
Meta Description: [ Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are battling to be the main gateway to the Internet. These companies have gained unprecedented influence over what people see and learn, and have created a industry with brave new rules for business. In a five-part series, NPR's Rick Karr takes a look at... ]
Objects Search - An uncluttered interface offers options to search the web, news and blogs, includes cached pages and 'anchors', which are titles and descriptions from the Open Directory.
Meta Description: [ Search engine that allows users to search information, news,videos and images across the Web ]
500Pipeline - A clustering engine with a streamlined interface, which presents all results in one column and clusters by topic in another.
Scrub The Web - Search engine with sponsored links at the top of results. Also offering a meta tag builder and analyzer.
Meta Description: [ STW search engine provides quality search engine results for Internet searches. Submit your URL to Scrub The Web today! ]
Search Engines and Editorial Integrity - Article from the USC Online Journalism Review examines the issue of major search engines adopting deceptive, misleading advertising practices at the expense of editorial integrity and their users.
SearchHippo - Indexes the sites listed in the major Internet directories. Offers free web services, including a search toolbar, and code for webmasters to provide search boxes on their sites.
Meta Description: [ SearchHippo.com provides a crisp and clean
web search experience. ]
The Evolution of Web Searching - David Green's paper from Online Information Review explores the development of search engine technologies.
Meta Description: [ David Green's paper on 'The evolution of web searching' was voted the 'Most Outstanding paper' by the editorial advisory board of the Online Information Review journal. ]
ThreeMice - Natural-language answer engine, which queries the internet in real time, and will serve up full text from selected sites.
Meta Description: [ ThreeMice.com Natural Language Answer Engine ]
Ulysseek - A straightforward search engine with a simple interface.
Meta Description: [ A straightforward internet search engine with a simple interface. ]
Wotbox - Search engine with country specific searching. Options to display country flags, and include preview and translation features. Sponsored links appear in panels separate from the main results.
