live.com --- Search improvements

Good afternoon everyone!  As you know we have  been doing a lot of things around search technologies, I recently blogged about the very cool beta of tafiti front end to the live search engine.  We have also made several improvements to the overall engine, and I wanted to let you know about some of great new features of our live search engine.  These improvements are currently released in the US and over the next 3 weeks 34 more countries will see the improvements as well.  What is even better is that we have made some great strides in relevancy and some of our initial testing is showing us gaining ground, and in some cases surpassing other Internet search engines.

So what’s new: 

At the core of the engine the development team really made some fantastic improvements!  They have really changed how we present the results.  Try these two queries: traffic or Frank Sinatra.  What did you think of those results?  

There has also been lots of under the cover changes as well.  The engine is looking at the intent of the queries looking to solve things like misspellings, and plurals.  Other improvements on the neural net technology that helps us determine the top results and relevancy algorithms.  We also made some significant improvements on how the results are presented and make it very easy for you take action on the results.  I also want to highlight 4 areas we have made some great enhancements: 

• Entertainment:  There have been some great improvements on how video results are presented.  We know have live in browser previews of the videos.  Try a video search on Halo 3.  (See my results to the right).  Now I know other search engines have done video searches before, but scroll your mouse over one of the videos and see what happens. 
• Health:  We had an acquisition of MedStory earlier this year, we are able now to bring trusted medical content to Live Search.
  Try searching for cold at health.live.com.
• Local:   There has been some great improvement,improved local listings, mapping, printed directions,  (try your favorite type of food and city and see what happens)
• Shopping:    Now you can search for a product or a product category, try searching for mp3 players. or lifecam vx-6000  Also take a look at how we show reviews, and information about the devices. 

Take a moment to try the new search through www.live.com and set Live Search as your default search engine.