Category Archives: Windows Live

Microsoft to unveil listings service

Microsoft will unveil a new listings service and marketplace within the next few weeks according to eWeek. The new service is a competitor to Google Base and will be integrated with Windows Live service offerings. Windows Live Fremont is currently only available to users with a Microsoft.com e-mail address. Microsoft plans to integrate listings submitted through its Windows Live service into MSN Search results as well as Virtual Earth map visualizations. TechCrunch dropped a teaser about the project yesterday….

Windows Live

Windows Live beta is up and running at Live.com. This page will be the default start page for Windows in the near future with Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista. Note that Microsoft has built feed search into the default home page on the top right under the “Add Content” header. Microsoft also now has a “Feeds” tab on its Windows Live search page, part of the MSN Search “Skylight” project it appears. You can also add podcasts direct to your home page by subscribing to the feed and the latest entry will appear with Windows Media Player loading the…

MSN Search quietly introduces feed search

MSN Search introduced feed-specific search last week using two new search operators for advanced users: feed and hasfeed. You may now restrict your search to only return results from the content of a RSS or Atom feed using the feed search operator. Here is an example MSN feed search for Niall Kennedy. You may also restrict your search to only include HTML pages with a declared RSS or Atom link alternate. Here is an example MSN feed search for Niall Kennedy on pages with a RSS or an Atom feed. These two operators pave the way for MSN to introduce…

Apple Cupertino headquarters not removed from MSN Visual Earth

There has been a rumor floating around this morning that Microsoft intentionally removed Apple’s current headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop from their satellite imagery of Cupertino. It’s not true. The satellite photograph used by MSN Visual Earth is from U.S. Geological Survey and was taken on October 30, 1991. I called Apple’s Public Relations department and confirmed the current headquarters building was not built at this time. U.S. Geological Survey also has a photograph of the area from February 27, 2004 but it looks incomplete. Microsoft Terraserver Imagery MSN Visual Earth USGS National Map Viewer If you look at the…

Microsoft RSS Search coming on Monday?

MSN has been busy this week crawling all the syndication feeds it can find. It looks like Microsoft is getting ready to announce feed search for MSN Search on Monday morning. The move is not too surprising as we have seen MSN dabble in RSS search with the small Start.com research project in public for a few months now. Are you curious what MSN has been up to? Check your server logs for IP addresses 207.68.146.41 and 207.68.146.47 to see the initial probe and 207.68.146.53 for the deeper revisit. 207.68.146.47 – – [21/Jul/2005:00:15:05 +0000] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0” 200 37 “-“…

Microsoft RSS search using Start.com

Microsoft announced a new version of Start.com yesterday that includes news and feed search. You can view the new Start.com and search for yourself. Search results are displayed in a JavaScript window and each search category’s results are displayed using asynchronous JavaScript. You can subscribe to the feed of any result in the RSS search results. I still don’t like the branding of feed search as “RSS search” but I do still ask for a Kleenex even if it’s a Puffs and my parents call a vacuum cleaner a Hoover even if it’s a Dyson. Tags: microsoft, feedsearch, rss…

MSN Search relaunch

MSN Search relaunched with music and Encarta integration as well as RSS results. Bill Gates: “Input from millions of our customers – including me – was crucial to our efforts to make MSN Search the best it can be.”…

Economist on Microsoft search

The Economist takes a look at Ask MSR, Dr. Eric Brill’s attempt to deliver a direct answer to a search question. “Ask MSR is still a prototype, although Microsoft is trying to improve it and it may be launched commercially under the name AnswerBot.” Eric Brill and Radu Soricut recently authored a paper on factoid questions. We build our QA system around a noisy-channel architecture which exploits both a language model for answers and a transformation model for answer/question terms, trained on a corpus of 1 million question/answer pairs collected from the Web. Our evaluations show that our system achieves…