Posts filed under 'Microsoft / Live.com'
At the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announced the official release of a client application for Windows Mobile devices as well as compatible J2ME capable devices in the US and UK. Some new features have been added, since the beta started back in November. The main features of Live Search for Mobile are:
Category-based local searching - Search businesses and restaurants through the Live.com category system.
Maps and Directions - Get maps of your area and directions to your destination. Hook up a GPS unit to search around and track your current position.
Traffic - View real-time traffic in selected US cities.
The Windows Mobile version also comes with a Contacts list integration and a SMS feature, that allows you to send a text message with a business adress and phone number.
February 16th, 2007
The Live.com team has released the first version of the Live Search SOAP API today. A lot of new features have been added to this release since the beta version. Here are the most important improvements:
- Search Results -Â increased from the first 250 to the first 1,000. And added a flag to disable host collapsing (the suppression of more than two results from a top-level URL) to facilitate the development of accurate paging algorithms.
- Search Tags -Â enhanced to return results as a comma-delimited list or as an array of name/value pairs. Results can also be filtered by the Search Tag name.
- Local Search - no longer do you need to specify lat & lon for location, you can now city names and zip codes, just like in the web UI. We’ve also added local data support for the following markets: en-AU, en-CA, en-GB, en-US, es-US, fr-CA, fr-FR, and it-IT.
- PhoneBook Results - Â now sort by distance and relevance
A more detailed overview can be found at the Microsoft Developer Network.
February 7th, 2007
Microsoft recently announced the launch of two new programs to help children in need. All that you have to do, to help them is to try Live Search on one of the “click for the cause†sites, and each search you do will add more money to Microsoft’s donation. The two organizations Microsoft is working with in these programs are ninemillion.org and Team Seattle.
Ninemillion.org is a United Nations led campaign providing education and sports programs for nine million refugee youth around the world, and Team Seattle is the most successful motorsports charity in the US, racing to benefit Seattle’s Children’s Hospital.
You can find more information about the programms on the Live Search blog.
January 23rd, 2007
comScore Networks today released its monthly Search analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In December 2006, Google Sites captured 47.3 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.4 share points from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites grew 0.3 share points, maintaining its second place ranking with 28.5 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.5 percent), Ask Network (5.4 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.9 percent).Â
Americans conducted 6.7 billion searches online in December, up 1 percent versus November. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 30-percent increase since the same month a year ago.
Google Sites led the pack with 3.2 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (713 million), Ask Network (363 million), and Time Warner Network (335 million).
January 16th, 2007
Microsoft and Baidu today announced a strategic alliance on paid search services, which will officially commence in December 2006. As a result of this strategic alliance, Microsoft will display Baidu’s paid search listings on the search results pages of certain Microsoft websites, including MSN, Live, and other partner websites in China. More details can be found at Shanghai Daily.
December 15th, 2006
The Live.com team has compiled a nice list of the most searched terms in 2006. The list contains different categories such as celebrity images, news, products, and travel. Because the FIFA World Cup this year, generated so many soccer related searches, they also added a list with the Top 10 soccer searches.
December 15th, 2006
The Live.com team has released a beta version of their new book search at http://books.live.com/. This release makes tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books available from their library scanning initiative, including books from the University of California, the University of Toronto, and the British Library. They also announced a new partnerships with the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine.
December 6th, 2006
Microsoft has added some information, on how to identify the different types of their MSNbot Crawlers, on the Live Search’s WebLog. The different types of the MSNbot are:
MSNBot
Main web crawler (www.live.com)
MSNBot-Media
Images & all other media (images.live.com)
MSNBot-NewsBlogs
News and blogs (search.live.com/news)
MSNBot-Products
Products & shopping (products.live.com)
MSNBot-Academic
Academic search (academic.live.com)
They also explain a method, to verify the identy of the MSNbot. Might be useful, since a lot of spam bots are cloaking themself as searchengine crawlers.
- When you get a page view request, it specifies a user-agent and an IP address. As I described above, all requests from Live Search use a user agent starting with the word ‘MSNBot’.
- If you see the MSNBot user-agent, it’s time to check the identity of the bot. Starting with the IP address (i.e. 207.46.98.149), you can use reverse DNS lookup to find out the registered name of the machine.
- Once you have the host name (in this case, livebot-207-46-98-149.search.live.com), you can check that it really is coming from Live Search. The name of all live search crawlers will end with ‘search.live.com’. If the name doesn’t end with ‘search.live.com’, you know it’s not really our crawler.
- Finally, you need to verify that the name is accurate. In order to do this, you can use Forward DNS to see the IP address associated with the host name. This should match the IP address you used in Step 2 – if it doesn’t, it means the name was fake.
November 30th, 2006
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