Entries tagged with live search - Channel 10

Olympic Fever: Search, Widgets, and More

sarahintampa — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:38:00 GMT

With the 2008 Beijing Olympics now underway, a lot of people are infected with Olympic Fever. There seems to be million ways to watch the Olympics this year and keep up with the news. We’ve highlighted some of these ways already, including the Silverlight-powered NBCOlympics website, Olympics on your mobile phone, the MSN toolbar's Olympics tab, Olympics on the Go for Media Center, and even an Olympics Medal Count Vista Gadget. But that’s still not all the ways you can keep up with the games, so how about a few more?

On the Neowin website, they’ve broken down all the ways in which Live Search is delivering Olympics coverage as well as offering other Olympics-related features. This includes the following:

Olympics 2008 news scope, available in Live Search News at http://news.live.com gives readers up-to-date coverage with additional elements such as Olympics 2008 news images.
Olympian xRank, available at http://xrank.live.com gives fans a way to track the popularity of their favorite athletes.
Olympics Videos are available at http://video.live.com when customers search “Olympics.”
The Live.com Homepage will rotate Olympics images in the background for the duration of the games.
Athlete Instant Answer will feature profiles of Olympians as searchers type in the first and last names of the athlete in search queries. For instance, fans can search “Shawn Johnson” or “LeBron James.”
Medal Count Instant Answer will provide an “all up” medal count by country, sport, or by country and sport when searchers type in Olympics-related keywords in search queries. For instance, fans can search terms like “swimming” or “China gymnastics.”

Get Back-to-School Rebates With Live Search Cashback

sarahintampa — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:52:00 GMT

Live Search Cashback, the program from Live Search that pays you to surf, has just launched a program called “Back to School Deal Days.” With this new program, which will only run for a limited time during the month of August, you can get extra cashback savings from Live Search cashback. As you browse through either the cashback site or the participating online stores, the cashback savings you see listed have already been increased. Some of the participating stores include Barnes & Noble.com, Overstock.com, Sears, Foot Locker, TigerDirect, hpHome, Buy.com, newegg.com, Zappos.com, and many more. You can start getting deals now by visiting search.live.com/cashback.

Have You Seen The New Live.com?

sarahintampa — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:07:00 GMT

In case you hadn’t noticed, the homepage at Live.com recently got a refresh. The new homepage now features a scenic background (see image at left for an example) which includes areas called “hotspots.” These hotspots are interactive, hyperlinked parts of the image that help you to explore searches that relate to the area of the image that they are linked to. The hotspots are obviously just a clever way to get people to come check out the page at live.com while also pointing them to the various types of search that Live Search can do (like image search, health searches, video search, etc). It’s kind of crazy, but it’s also kind of clever. Similar to Ask.com’s skins, the backgrounds at Live.com deliver “the pretty,” but its really the interactivity that’s drawing the curious visitors who come to check it out. Well, at least it’s different. Along with other unique programs, like the innovative Cashback offering where you can get paid to surf (linked from the live.com homepage), the new Live.com is just one more example of how the Live Search team is thinking up ways to engage new users.

Live Search - Cashback: What is it?

Tina — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:43:00 GMT

Many of you may have heard Bill Gates announcing the new Live Search cashback program or even received the email in your hotmail inbox. Well, I spent some time chatting with Brad Goldberg from the Live Search team and he talks not only about the new cashback program but about a few other things that Live Search have been working on.

Here's how Live Search cashback works:

Search

Search for cashback deals at Live Search cashback. Each time you click a Live Search cashback listing, you'll find great deals on the product you chose. Your results will clearly list the cashback savings you'll receive off the store price, and your final bottom-line price that includes tax and shipping costs. Also look for this icon when you search for a product on Live Search to find great cashback deals.

Shop

Compare and sort products by the bottom-line price. Click the best deal to go to the store. Everything you buy during that store visit will be eligible for Live Search cashback. On your first time using Live Search cashback, we will ask you for an email address so we can tell you how to quickly set up your free cashback account.

Save

Keep saving money each time you use Live Search cashback. Every time you make a qualifying purchase, we'll send you an email to confirm your Live Search cashback savings. When your cashback account reaches a balance of at least $5, you can claim your cold, hard cash. Terms and conditions.

Expanded Wikipedia Results in Live Search

sarahintampa — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:23:00 GMT

The Live Search team has just announced a change to the search results that will now show more of a Wikipedia entry than before. This is a great new feature since many times when you’re doing a search, you just need a quick answer and Wikipedia is usually the link you click to read the info you need. So now in the Live Search results, there’s a good portion of the first paragraph available from the Wikipedia article under the link to Wikipedia. Do you love it or hate it? Let the team know. Personally, I’ve found it useful enough to make Live Search my Wikipedia search engine of choice.

Make Your Live Maps Collections Mobile

sarahintampa — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:18:00 GMT

The guys over at LiveSide have a tutorial on how to use the newly updated Live Search for Mobile to take your Live Maps collections with you when you're on the go by adding them to your mobile phone. The first step is to create the collection on your desktop PC. You could then simply make it a public collection and find it by doing a search on your mobile phone, but by following these steps, it's actually a bit easier to access it without having to search:

On your PC, go to Live Maps and create a collection.
Make the Collection a Favorite and then open your Favorite Collections.
Click the Subscribe button to subscribe to this collection. This is a one-time thing - now that you're subscribed, any updates you do to the collection will be automatically updated on the phone too.
Convert the URL to a TinyURL
On your phone, go to Live Search for Mobile, open Collections, go to the Menu and choose "Add Collection using URL"
Enter in the TinyURL you created and click "Done."

That's it! The collection will now be on your phone from this point on.

You can visit the LiveSide blog for even more details and watch a video they shot with Steve Lombardi from Live Maps where they check out the new features of Live Search for Mobile. (via/img courtesty of LiveSide)

Live Search for Mobile: Part Two

Tina — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:57:00 GMT

In part two of "Live Search for Mobile" I spend some time exploring Live Search with Andrew Bell.

Live Search for Mobile has just released the latest updates to our browser-based mobile search at m.live.com. One of our major efforts was to bring the power of product search to the convenience of a mobile phone. Think about how much time people spend shopping in brick-and-mortar stores — without the ability to do the product research they're accustomed to from their PCs.

We took the great product search features from Live Search and made them easy to use on your mobile phone. You'll see a list of popular products, user ratings, and price comparisons from online stores. You can also research products by reading a detailed overview or consumer reviews. Now the next time a consumer electronics device catches your eye in a store, you'll be able to get the detailed rundown on its performance, read the consensus wisdom of the Web, compare it with similar products, and even make sure it's being offered for a good price — all before you make that impulse buy. Now you can spend wisely, wherever you are.

Another of our favorite features this release was developed specifically for our friends abroad — those in the United Kingdom and Japan. Searching for nearby businesses is one of the most popular and most valued types of mobile search today. But most existing browser-based search services require the user to first type in their location — easy if you're always in the same place, but a chore when you're out and about, and a real challenge if you don't know exactly where you are.

With this new feature, users can simply click Find my Location, and their location will be set based on their proximity to cellular towers. Then they can get the most relevant nearby results for all their searches.

Search Share for Facebook

sarahintampa — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:36:00 GMT

A Live Search powered Facebook app called Search Share lets you search for all kinds of information that you can then share with your Facebook friends. Results for Search Share can include videos, images, web pages, news, and more. But Search Share isn't just a way to see traditional search engine results within Facebook, you can also preview the content and select the results you want via drag-and-drop in order to share them with your friends.

The items you want to share are dropped into a box at the top of the app and you can then choose to email those items to a friend or post them to your feed. What's really wild is that when you hover your mouse over a thumbnail of a video, it automatically starts playing. I wasn't expecting that - I figured you would have to go off site to watch videos, but it's all right there in Facebook.

On the main Search Share page, some interesting topics are already listed for you like Today's Hot Topics. For example, today's #1 topic is "polar bear status" (how sad!). There are also boxes showing Top Celebrities, Words of the Day, Your Friends' Latest Searches, and Your Saved Search History.

Search Share is somewhat similar to Zine, in that it facilitates you being able to share various items with friends, but unlike Zine, it's more of a tool that can be used as needed instead of an online digital magazine.

Live Search Spring Update Walk Through

Nic — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:14:00 GMT

I'm joined by Chris Rayner from the Live Search team as we walk through some of the new features in the latest spring update to Live Search. We check out xRank, News Search, Products, Live Search Health, HealthVault and Rick Astley... naturally.

Live Search is at www.live.com.

Customizing Vista's Search

sarahintampa — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:49:00 GMT

Remember how I told you that you could add Wikipedia to your choices in Windows Vista's default search? Well, there are other ones you can add, too, like these:

Live Search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%+

IMDB: http://search.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%+

Dictionary Search: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=%+

Now what I need to know is how I can use all of them - the gpedit.msc section (see earlier instructions on this) only lets you pick one. I want them all! Any ideas?

Live Search Gets a Facelift

sarahintampa — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:47:00 GMT

The Live Search page got a new UI. I actually first heard the news from a quick post over at the Windows Live Chronicles blog, so I went to check it out. I think it's rather pretty myself. What do you think?

There's a post on the official blog of the Live Search team about the redesign. Apparently, the homepage wasn't the only thing that received a makeover. In fact, quite a few changes have been made recently, including:

Search box near results - the header is slimmer putting the search box closer to the results page
Room to breathe on the page - the page is centered, on a fixed-width page, which is great for widescreen users
Crisp, clean type - In addition to new colors, the team decided to use Arial improves readability
Intuitive video search - video search is simpler, streamlined
Health results integrated from many sources - in health search health information comes in from many different sources and is available all from one place

Microsoft has a growing design community that cares about figuring these things out. We even have some nice articles that will interest designers.

Live Search News Launches

sarahintampa — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The Live Search team has just launched a new feature for finding news on the web: Live Search News. Here, you can find the latest news stories, categorized as "Top Stories," "World," "U.S.," "Local," "Business," "Politics," "Entertainment," "Sports," "Sci/Tech," and "Health."

The site has several really great features, one of which is the local news sidebar. Although you can access local news by clicking on the category page, having the sidebar there makes keeping tabs on your state's news even easier - especially when you just want a quick glance at the top stories.

Another cool feature is the "breaking news" bar at the top. You won't see this all the time, but when a big story is released, you'll see an orange bar at the top linking to the article.

When you're browsing the news, you can click "more on this story," to pull up a whole list of related stories about that topic while, in the sidebar, you are presented with options to refine by location or category or perform related searches.

Another unique feature to Live Search News are the "news videos" sections found midway down on most of the categories' main page. Here, you can access the days big stories in video format - and we're not talking videos from a user-gen site here - the videos come from Reuters TV, AP Video, Fox News, ABC News, USA Today, CNN, and other similar news organizations. What's even cooler is that you don't have to leave Live Search News to view them - just rolling over the video with your mouse will begin to play their stream.

The site also has a clean and well-designed look and feel and will certainly appeal to news junkies everywhere.

New Live Search Features for Windows Mobile and Blackberry

sarahintampa — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:05:00 GMT

Along with the announcement about the new version of Windows Mobile, version 6.1, it was also announced that Live Search for Windows Mobile and Blackberry is going to be updated, too. The updates include mapping contacts, Virtual Earth integration, voice input, and weather.

The ability to map contacts means you can see the locations of those in your address book on a map so you are then able to easily get directions to that location.

The Virtual Earth integration will offer you the ability to make "map collections," or custom maps that you or your friends create. The maps are made on your PC prior to viewing them in Live Search.

For Blackberry users, the new version of Live Search will offer voice input, something that previously only Windows Mobile users had the ability to use. With voice input, you only need speak a command in order to find businesses or get directions via Live Search.

Additionally, weather will be added to Live Search, so you can see both the current conditions and the 4-day forecast.

Left vs. Right

sarahintampa — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 06:00:00 GMT

A new Live Search promotional site, Left vs. Right, has been launched. The site features two new anchors, left-leaning "Patrick O'Neil" and right-wing "Britt Hayes," who represent both sides of the political spectrum. In the middle of the page is a search box which will perform Live Search queries. When you type in a keyword or question in the search box, the two characters will began a humorous discussion or debate about the topic. Or perhaps just insult each other. Even if you don't type anything in, the characters will begin a funny skit. Hilarious time-waster! (via Inside Microsoft)

Let's Discover Live Search

nuric — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:26:00 GMT

Live Search is a set of different search tools and options that shifts search experience. In this screencast we will cover basic search options and after text, image and video search we will look to the products search, health search, book search also. After 6 November 2007 the relevance of Live Search is increased tremendously; especially in Turkey. So I recommend you to use www.live.com for local and global searches.

Live Search työkalu tarjoaa nopean tavan omiin eri palveluiden hakuihin.

jukkaw — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:39:00 GMT

Live Search työkalupalkki tarjoaa näppärän tavan lisätä omia hakukohteita helposti käytettäväksi.

Olemassa olevia hakupalvelun tarjoajia voidaan helposti lisätä hakupalkkiin valitsemalla haluttu palvelun tarjoaja listasta. Lisäksi erittäin näppärä ominaisuus on luoda omia hakupalvelu, jolloin voidaan lisätä mikä tahansa url parametrejä tukeva hakupalvelu pikahaun piiriin.

Hakupalveluiden lisääminen on todella näppärää, kuten alla on kuvattu.

Työkalun alasvetovalikosta valitaan lisättävien tarjoajien haku(Find More Providers...),

josta saa helposti lisättyä valmiita palvelun tarjoajia hakupalkin hakukohteisiin.

Näppärää, eikö vain?

Mielenkiintoisena ominaisuutena on kustomoitujen hakupalveluiden lisäys mahdollisuus, jossa voidaan parametrien avulla ottaa käyttöön mieleisen palvelun hakuominaisuudet - suoraan työkalusta käytettäviksi.

Jos esimerkiksi halutaan käyttää webistä löytyvää ilmaista sanakirjapalvelua, voidaan sen hakutoiminnallisuudet tuoda yhden painalluksen taakse.

Uuden palvelun lisäyksessä tulee syöttää sivuston haku url siten, että hakukentän arvoksi laitetaan TEST -teksti, jolloin tässä esimerkissä URL tekstiksi tulee: http://www.ilmainensanakirja.fi/trans?Q=TEST&Q2=&P=12

Lisäksi hakupalvelulle annetaan tietysti nimi.

Tämä url vastaa sanakirjasivuston osoitetta, joka tuottaa parametrinä annetun sanan käännöksen englannista suomeen.

Kun tiedot on syötetty, hyväksytään lisäys.

Haettaessa valitaan vain haluttu palvelu, jota halutaan haussa käyttää ja se on siinä.

Palveluja voipi sitten olla niin työpaikat, keskusteluryhmät, autot, yms, mitä sitten tuleekin tarpeeseen.

New Live Search Features

sarahintampa — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:14:00 GMT

The Live Search team announced on their latest blog post some great new features for Live Search: Autospell and Stemming. They hope that these features will help to return the best search results for your intent, and not just the particular terms you searched for. The Autospell feature determines whether or not you've misspelled your search term and delivers you a page of spell-corrected search results as opposed to a "Did you mean _______?" link at the top. They promise that this feature will only be activated if they are "absolutely, completely, totally, 'no doubt about it' confident you misspelled one of your search terms!" The second big improvement is stemming. What stemming does is match the "stem," or root of the word, rather than the exact word. As an example, they reported that users had told them that the search "half price book Redmond" returned terrible results, but "half price books Redmond" was much better. Wtih stemming, searches for "half price book" will now also return the results of "half price books." Stemming is tricky because you can "stem" all the time - a search for "cable" could mean TV or some type of cord! So the challenge with stemming is knowing when to turn it on and off. Try some searches for yourself and then let the team know what you think!

Live Search for Blackberry

sarahintampa — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:01:00 GMT

OK, so you don't have a Windows Mobile device. Like many busy professionals, your mobile device of choice is a Blackberry. But now, that doesn't mean that you have to miss out on having Windows Live Search on your phone! With the recent introduction of Live Search for Blackberry (beta), you, too, can get the best of what Live Search Mobile has to offer - including local search, maps, directions, traffic conditions, and more, and all of it custom designed for BlackBerry. To get the download, visit wls.live.com on your Blackberry phone. On the page that displays, click on the "Download" link. If you don't have a Windows Mobile Device or Blackberry, you can use Live Search from your phone's browser at m.live.com.

Free 411 from Live Search

sarahintampa — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:22:00 GMT

On Monday, Live Search 411 was officially launched. This voice-activated local search service lets you do local searches right from your phone just by speaking. To use the service, call 1-800-CALL-411 (1-800-225-5411) from any phone in the U.S. and say where you are and what you are looking for. The service can also send you text messages, maps, traffic maps, and text-based directions. Live Search 411 goes a step beyond simply providing you with business information though - several handy features make this new service really stand out, including:

The ability to connect to any business listing you find for free
Receive SMS links to maps, driving directions and traffic conditions (just say "text me the info")
Get movie showtimes and even buy tickets over the phone (via a partnership with Fandango)
Share text messages of business details with friends so they can easily meet you there
Hear the current weather conditions and the forecast
Quickly access travel resources like airlines, hotels, and rental cars
Remember your personalized locations for movie theaters, weather and traffic, and your preferences for receiving text messages.

Learn more at: http://www.livesearch411.com

New release of Virtual Earth

Laura — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:22:00 GMT

This application just keeps getting better and better. My favorite part about this, is the 3D modeling feature in the authoring section. I love the way the tools we use to make our lives easier are more and more turning into mini-games. Besides that they've done a seamless blend of 3D imagery with Live Search. There's a ton more stuff to help you learn things and get from point A to point B in style. Take a look.

Live Search for Windows Mobile

sarahintampa — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:17:00 GMT

A must-have for Windows Mobile users is the Live Search app for mobile devices. If you need to search for a place, get directions, or find what else is in the area, Live Search for Windows Mobile can really be a lifesaver. After installation, to use Live Search, you just click on the Live Search icon from the device's Start Menu, and the application launches. From the main screen, you can easily navigate to select the city of your choice by drilling down by geographic region and alphabetical listings. To find a business or category, you enter in the information you need to find in the search box and your results will display on a map. You can use the routing feature to get directions from point A to point B, and, in major cities, you can even see what traffic is like on your selected route. Roadblocks and delays get highlighted in red, letting you know if you need to plan an earlier departure to reach your destination in time.

Using a compatible Bluetooth GPS receiver, you can view your location on the map in real-time. If you're in a particular area and are looking for things to do, you can use the Live Search tool to find nearby restaurants, shopping & services, transportation, nightlife, and more. After choosing a particular selection from this menu, you can zoom in, get directions, save to your contacts, or SMS the location to a friend. To get the application, download Live Search from http://ls.windowsmobile.com using your device's browser.

New Features in Live Search Maps

sarahintampa — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:04:00 GMT

The folks over on LiveSide have announced some coming changes to the popular online mapping service, Live Search Maps. To begin, the two search boxes have been combined into one box and moved over to the left with the links to search Businesses, People, Collections, and Locations below it. The links to the Welcome page, Directions, Collections, Notes, Share, and PrintAs have moved as well, now over towards the top-right side of the page. These moves give more room to the map itself as the header is no longer getting in the way.

Another major improvement that I am really looking forward to is the new ability to compress either the beginning or end of a set of driving directions. For example, although I need to make 4 turns to get on the highway from my house, I do not need those turns spelled out for me when I'm getting directions from point A to point B. This feature will let me condense that into one step as opposed to showing turn-by-turn directions for each of those steps. Not only does this make the directions easier to read at a glance while driving, it has the added "green" benefit of conserving paper.

Next up is the "1-click directions" feature. If you are providing directions to others when you are hosting an event, the attendees will be coming from multiple starting points. The 1-click directions feature will show directions to the endpoint from the North, South, East, and West. These major routes are shown as well as alternative routes coming from the same direction, if there are multiple ways to arrive. Another good use of this feature is providing directions to your customers to help them locate your business.

Finally, other improvements include the ability to re-route directions to miss bad traffic, icons to the left of the driving directions showing arrows and other symbols for turns and start/endpoints, and bolded text for the turns and street names, making the directions much easier to follow when you're in traffic.

Live Search for Celebs

sarahintampa — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:41:00 GMT

Want to get all the details on your favorite celebrity? Live Search's Celebrity search results combine top content into a single, interactive answer, providing content from images, video, movies, bios, and more. The celebrity's xRank is also intergrated into the results to provide a measure of popularity. xRank is a fun way to track celebrities' rises and falls in the rankings. Based on the number of searches throughout the day, xRank gives a numerical rating for the most popular of Hollywood heavyweights, radio darlings, trendsetters, athletes, politicians, and other notables.

It's "Hot or Not" for search results. On the Celebrity xRank page, you can not only do searches for celebrities, but you can also scan the rankings, read bios, track trends, and see related celebs (the celebrity's friends, family, co-workers, enemies, and romantic interests). Icons next to a celebrity's name show whether the celebrity is Trending up - popularity is increasing (green up arrow), slipping down - popularity is decreasing (red down arrow), rocketing up - popularity is soaring (green up arrow with flames), or plummeting down (red down arrow towards a black hole). What do you think of Live Searhc's celebrity search feature? Do a head to head comparison like I did for one of my favorite celebs and compare the results. In my case, I actually preferred Live Search's results. Do you?

Live Image Search advances

Larry — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:46:00 GMT

The image search team at Microsoft deserves a day off, the latest release of enhancements really sets Live Search apart from the others. But don't take my word for it, here, try it for yourself. Go ahead and image search "Red Roses" using Live Search, Yahoo! Image Search, and Google Images. I'll wait here.

All the images in the Live Search have been given a uniform size, making it cleaner looking and easier to scan the large number of images. There is an image resize slider to allow you to dynamically control how big the pictures are in the page (mousing over the image results gives you a bigger version and details), and there is a scratchpad where you can drag pictures to hold on to.

One of the biggest things setting Live Search apart from other engines is that the results come back on one page. That's right, scroll down to where you would find the next page link on other search engines. Notice that Live Search just keeps giving you more images to view.

What you may not notice is that the team has sped up the rendering of the page, it now increases the speed of your experience by 44% on average. Another big improvement was in the adult filtering, which uses skin and face detection as well as some shape detection techniques (which leads me to wonder what shapes they are looking for.)

The image search team also greatly enhanced relevance. This is most noticable in searches for things like celebrity pictures. Check out this search of Hillary Duff. Where other image search engines start breaking down into images of Hillary's purse, MTV page graphics, and the layout of the venues she plays, Live Search stays on task, delivering you just the pictures of the celebrity you are looking for. Of course, if you are really interested in Hillary purses, you can always just search for that.

Change the world with a search

Larry — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:28:00 GMT

We know you want to help change the world, that you'd volunteer to help teach refugee children around world if you weren't busy with that 9 to 5 job. But really, what can one person - perhaps a hemisphere away - do to help? Easy, use this Live Search page.

Through March 31st, Microsoft will make a contribution to ninemillion.org to help support educational programs for refugee youth. So bookmark it, tell your friends, or add the gadget to your Windows Live Space or Live.com.