Relevance
I see that Mary Jo mentions that a major revision to the Microsoft Live Search 2.0 will be released on September 26th. I can neither confirm nor deny the date (primarily as I am not on the Live team and would be making up any date I gave you ;)
At the Company Meeting last Thursday, however, I can tell you that the Live Search team gave the best demo of the day BY FAR. One of the Product Managers came up on stage wearing a black shirt with white letters that said RELEVANCE. He then demonstrated the awesome new features of Windows Live search relating to relevance, index size, instant answers, and some pretty sweet unannounced new capabilities (I can't wait until they go live).
I have been playing with the beta internally, and I think it will win us some converts. I am a big fan of the Live folks, who happen to have the most responsive team on internal discussion lists. Whenever an employee pings the list with When I query for <whatever> on Live, the result I need is number 4 on the results page, while Google or Yahoo have it as number 1 or 2, someone on the team comes right back with an explanation for the existing result, and a description of what changes they are making to increase the relevancy for that search in the upcoming release. My personal opinion is that search is something we are getting ready to get very very right.
I'll quit gushing now :)
