MSN recently announced its new version of MSN City Guides, which includes Live Search and Live Maps options. The new integration will make it easy to organize events with just a few clicks.

Local search results has been integrated throughout the site, so that users can get relevant results. The improved filtering capability of Live Search will make it easier for users to search for things based on their chosen criteria.

You can search results based on relevance, date, type, or within a certain mile radius. The easy links to Live Search Maps and one-click directions will also help you find listing for local business.

Here's a screen preview of the new MSN City Guide:

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MSN City Guides Gets a Makeover With Live Search and Live Maps!

The Live Search mobile team recently launched two new features – MSN video search and MLB dashboard. The new features are expected to make mobile search more smoother and faster.

With the help of these features users will be able to view videos on latest events like Obama’s First 100-Days event. All you need to do is type “obama” in the mobile phone search box, and click the “MSN video” section to tune in. If you're a die-hard baseball fan then to keep track of your favorite baseball team's statistics, just search for “mlb” and you'll find a dashboard with the latest scores, news, and standings for your favorite team.

Here's a screenshot of the Live Search Mobile:

To experience these features, just visit the official Live Search site on your web-enabled mobile phone.

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Live Search Mobile Launches 2 New Features- MSN Video Search & MLB Dashboard

Microsoft Live Search Blog recently announced the launch of a series of SEM blog– SEM 101. The primary aim behind the launch is to train people in promoting their websites.

According to Rick DeJarnette, Live Search Webmaster Center team, “My goal for this series is to help folks who suddenly find themselves responsible for promoting their organization’s website. I’ve seen many visitors in the forums who ask basic questions, so I know there is an audience for this line of articles. I personally know many folks in my life outside work (there is such a thing, right?) who manage websites for their businesses but know little-to-nothing of SEM.”

Many webmaster believe that the new blog series will help them improve their site's position without touching the factors influencing the algorithm.

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Microsoft Live Search Launches SEM 101- A New Blog Series

Microsoft recently announced Traffic, a new addition to its Live Search 411 (1-800-CALL-411 or 1-800-225-5411). The company has tied up with INRIX, a leading provider of traffic to offer latest traffic reports in your neighborhood or along a route. Moreover, users can also personalize information by saving your start and end points. The new feature also provides estimated drive time so that users can plan accordingly. The best part about this latest addition is that you can call and search from any phone, simply by saying it ( no need to type).

In October 2007, Microsoft launched Live Search 411 with the primary aim to bring the power of local search to any phone. Over the years, it released various new features to help users in every possible way. For instance, their Driving Directions provided users turn-by-turn directions guide. Then, there are Sports and Stock Quotes to help users get the latest game and the Dow. Beside these, the company also offered features like Business Search, Weather reports, Movie Showtimes, Travel resources and Cheap Gas prices.

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Microsoft Rolls Out Traffic: The Latest Addition to Live Search 411

A few days ago, Microsoft launched a new version of Live Search Maps. With the help of this feature you can update your listing.

However, it was recently found that this feature can be enjoyed by only US businesses. In response, MSNDude, an official Microsoft representative said:

“Unfortunately, we currently do not support local listings outside of the US. However, I believe the local listings team is working to expand this in the near future.”

Although, no one is really sure how long it will take, but it is expected within a year.

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Microsoft Soon to Release Global Live Search Local Listing!

Microsoft recently announced the launch of an improved cashback shopping site. It will integrate Live Search Products (shopping vertical within Live Search) and cashback. In one of our earlier posts we talked about the positive results shown by Microsoft Live Search Cashback program. Microsoft believes that the new site will make it easier for users to research, compare products, and also save money.

The combination of these two interfaces also led to a few enhancements especially on site performance and relevance. And this also introduces Microsoft’s very own Live Search platform.

Some of the other features that users can enjoy on this site include, product reviews, opinion ranking, and product browsing by feature and ratings.

To experience this new feature visit Live Search Products and click on cashback option.

Here's a screenshot of the new site:

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Microsoft Combines Live Search Products with Cashback Program

Yesterday, was a proud day for Live Search, since it finally unveiled the must anticipated internet new brand– MSN Windows Live Search on kumo@microsoft.com. Every component of the new brand has undergone a lot of research and modifications.

Here are some of the amazing features of this new brand:

• Instant Weather forecast for your local area. Just type in your postcode followed by “weather”.
• Find dictionary definitions of a word. Simply type “define” followed by the word.
• Search for stock quotes easily. Type the FISE registered company symbol followed by “Quote” or “Stock”.
• Find the date of an upcoming holiday. Just the name of the holiday and a year.
• Quickly solve your math problems. Type in your equation for quick results.
• Convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. Just type in the degrees in the search bar for quick results.
• Answer everyday questions with the power of extras.

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Live Search Announces MSN Windows Live Search

Recently, Live Search released two new features – Instant Answers and Active Answers. The primary aim of these features is to give instant and up-to-date information.

• Instant Answers

This feature has been released after keeping in mind the March Madness. With the help of this new feature users can get latest going ons in the NCAA Tournament such as Team Standings, Score highlights and other relevant information.

For example, just type in “Duke Blue Devils” and you'll get all the latest information about the tournament right on the search page.

• Active Answers

It is also quite similar to the previous feature. The only difference is that it retrieves up-to-the-minute information related to air travel from the web.

For example, if you type Alaska 328, then Live Search will provide detailed information about the particular flight, which includes terminal and gate information.

Finally, for any generic search, Live Search offers interactive boxes to users on the results page to refine their searches. The interface will prompt them to enter more specific information regarding flight schedules.

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Live Search Releases Instant and Active Answers

If you are a frequent user of Live Search Cashback program then here is some good news for you. It is now available on MSN Toolbar!

“The MSN Toolbar contains a cashback–offer-detecting mechanism. This means that wherever you search online — whether it’s Yahoo, Live, Google or Craigslist — the toolbar will gleam an icon if there is cashback available for the item you searched for.” -Mikko Ollila, Product Manager, Live Search

Try Today!

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Live Search "Cashback" Available On MSN Toolbar!

Excogitation Or Speculation? Microsoft is testing new test program called kumo.com for employees to try and give apt feedback!

Kip Kniskern of Liveside.net is reporting that Kumo is due for some extremely vital changes… But what are those changes?

It was in the month of November 2008 when we bequeathed a deeper insight on Kumo being the successor of Microsoft's Live Search.

Here is the Memo that search executive Satya Nadella just sent to his employees :

From: Satya Nadella

Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 4:18 PM

To: Microsoft – All Employees (QBDG)

Subject: Announcement: Internal Search Test Experience

The Search team needs you. We've been working hard to improve our search service and want to share the progress we are making with you. We are launching a new test program called kumo.com for employees to try and provide feedback. Kumo.com exists only inside the corporate network, and in order to get enough feedback we will be redirecting internal live.com traffic over to the test site in the coming days. Kumo is the codename we have chosen for the internal test.

We are committed to rapid innovation and improvement. Please give the test site a try, rate the results and let us know what you think.

- Satya

At this point, no one is exactly sure as to what is happening, but some big thing is on the cards for sure…

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Microsoft To Soon Test 'Kumo' Search Service

The current hot topic related with SEO industry seems to have a very deep relationship with Google’s algorithm changes that favors big brands, but it looks that Microsoft Live Search (another search engine) has some other plans in mind. The later one is in the favor of “Best Match” along with other features to improvise on its search results and give a better browsing experience to its users.

Vanessa Fox of Search Engine Land talks about some interesting “Live Search changes” in her latest post! Let us have a look at them:

“Today, I came across some interesting Live Search changes that I can only reproduce on one computer running XP and only on Internet Explorer when I search from live.com (rather than the toolbar).”

Best match: understanding searcher intent

Microsoft Live Search appears to be flighting a new instant answer called “Best Match” that highlights what presumably Microsoft finds to be ideal result for the query. This new feature isn’t triggered for all queries and seems to appear using similar criteria as Google’s sitelinks. The query has to be unambiguous and navigational. It’s less “we’re very confident this result is the best” and more “we’re very confident that we know exactly what you are searching for”.

Why does this new feature favor brands? Search engines can be more confident of a searcher’s intent with a branded search than with most other types of queries. Someone searching for [woodland park zoo] likely is looking for their site specifically. Someone searching for [zoo] could be looking for lots of different things.

More than just brands

However, this new instant answer isn’t being triggered for brand searches only. For instance, a search for [fug] brings up the Go Fug Yourself site (unfortunately, it brings up their old site that’s now redirecting).

Changes from regular listings

It appears as though this new featured result replaces the URL’s normal first position in the search results. Site owners should be pleased that this new placement with bold, larger font will draw even more of the searcher’s attention. Unless, of course, searchers skip right over it, thinking it’s an ad.

There are differences beyond simply being highlighted as the best match. The URL shows up above the snippet rather than below it. The cache link is gone. And the “show more results from” link is no longer.

iPod query before

iPod query after

Read more @ Search Engine Land

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Experiments By "Microsoft Live Search": 'Best Match' And 'Categorized Listings'

It seems that Live Search is immensely serious about providing all kinds of tips for large sites so that their owners can optimize their sites for search. It was not long back when they came up with certain helpful tips concerned with the same topic.

Now, the official blog of the Live Search team is talking about their series, called “Optimizing your very large site for search,” that is arrayed with four vital aspects that a site should look at in order to enhance its relevance and coverage. Here is what their team has to say:

“Part 1

We started by focusing on reducing the surface area of your site by removing and canonicalizing your URLs. Reducing URLs that are redundant or unnecessary will make room for the ones that are. This post offers some practical suggestions on how to make fewer URLs a reality.

Part 2

After removing redundant URLs, we focused on the need to optimize for crawl by ensuring you are compressing your site and telling us which content is new or recently updated. This helps us focus on crawling the latest and greatest content.

Part 3

The third post is all about producing content in a way that ensures it is crawled. Despite improvements in Silverlight and Flash, it is still difficult for us to ensure all of your content makes it into the index. This post offers some suggested workarounds and advice when using these advanced technologies.

Part 4

To wrap things up, we look at content from a big site perspective and offer some suggested content management strategies for ensuring your site’s rapid growth doesn’t hinder the ability of your content to be accessible to users and, as a result, suffer in ranking”

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“Optimizing Your Very Large Site For Search”- A Series By Live Search!

The Microsoft adCenter blog has made an announcement that they have added another ad position to the UK search results, just as they did in the US in September 2008. This will not only increase their mainline search ad position but also provide an extra ad visibility to enhance the traffic as well.

“We've made some enhancements that will not only provide extra ad visibility to help boost incoming traffic, but will also provide an improved layout and better search experience for our users.”

It would be interesting to know whether these changes are beneficial for the advertisers only or for the Internet users as well?
Discussion is going on at AdCenterCommunity

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Recession Hit Live Search Add Fourth Ad Position to the UK Results!

Microsoft India has released a new version of its Live Search Maps that will allow its users to plan multi-city road trips in a single search query with its multi point routing ability! With its detailed version, users can search for directions based on their preference level (according to their interest and choice of landmarks) and access street maps for top 17 cities and highway road network covering 48,000 cities and towns.

"Our focus is on constantly providing innovative and unique services that meet evolving needs of users on the PC and Mobile, and the release of this version of Live Search Maps India within three months of the first launch in November 2008 is testament to this,” said Ravi Datanwala, Group Manager – Live Search, Consumer and Online, Microsoft India. “The new features have been incorporated basis a deep understanding of what Indians are looking for when searching for directions and maps, and we are sure our users will see value in them,” he added.

The current updated version has been developed by the Live Search and Incubations for Emerging Markets team at Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC) based in Hyderabad. Users can log on to http://maps.live.co.in/ and http://m.live.co.in and can avail the version for their personal computers or mobile phones.

Microsoft has also opened the APIs for Indian enterprise and developer communities to enable increased communication and enhance the development of custom mapping applications using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth as well. Microsoft India and the Hyderabad Police Department even launched a venture called “Know Your Police Station” that allows the users of Live Search Maps find out the services like the nearest police station around them and so on!

“Continually providing citizens with services that are relevant and easy to use is a huge focus for Hyderabad Police and our partnership with Microsoft to create this unique Live Maps based application, is an important step in this direction. With the launch of the application, Know Your Police Station, citizens can now access information on Police Stations across Hyderabad in an intuitive and interactive manner. We look forward to a long term engagement with Microsoft to ensure that we are constantly providing citizen services that are essential and easy to use." – B Prasada Rao, Commissioner, Hyderabad Police.

"The innovative features of the new release have been developed by my team at the Microsoft India Development Center in Hyderabad. In addition to landmark based directions, Multi-point Routing, and increased coverage to 17 cities, we have enabled access to the Virtual Earth platform via APIs to the developer community, thereby encouraging developers and enterprises to build innovative solutions that leverage the power of the platform and our rich Indian data. One example of this is the citizen service we have developed in partnership with the Hyderabad police," said Gurpreet S. Pall, General Manager – Live Search and MSN Technologies, Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC).

Features:

• Maps for 8 new Indian cities (Nasik, Indore, Sholapur, Surat, Nagpur, Pimpri/Chinchwad, Chandigarh/Mohali/Panchkula, Panaji/Marmagao)
• Improved Driving Directions
• Driving Directions based on Landmarks
• Multipoint Routing and Round trip
• Collections Search
• New APIs for Developers
• Interactive Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Virtual Earth Map Control
• Virtual Earth Web Services (VEWS)

"We are happy to continue to work with Microsoft in its constant improvement of Live Search Maps for India. Together we continue to bring a fresh and increasingly relevant Live Search Maps to consumers in India supported by the highest quality data, delivering additional value to users. The data in this new generation Live Search Maps allows users to accurately locate places in India through landmarks, places of general interest and via multiple routes that are relevant to them. And NAVTEQ’s database for India has received all of the required approvals from Governmental authorities in India. We look forward to continuing to play a role in delivering a quality experience to Live Search Map users in India," said Rich Shuman, Senior Vice President – Asia Pacific Sales, NAVTEQ.

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Microsoft Releases Expanded Version Of Live Search Maps For India!

If you are using Internet Explorer 8, then you can get Live Search instant answers in your search box! According to the Live Search Blog,

“IE8 users can now get Live Search instant answers, including financial information, weather conditions, movie show times, calculations, equations, conversions, and definitions directly in the IE8 search box.”

For example, if you want instant answers on stock quotes, then you need to type in MSFT in the search box and you will get the relevant information along with a performance graph as well. Here is the screenshot:

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Live Search Instant Answers in your IE8 Search Box!

The official blog of live search team has announced the official integration of Live Search into Firefox by popular demand.

Here is what the team has to say on this issue:

“For example, start to type "Bruce Springsteen" into the Live Search box, and you're shown relevant suggestions. The list of suggestions refreshes as you continue typing or when you change the query. You can click the suggestion that best matches what you were searching for to speed you to your results. The add-on is available in the following markets: Australia (AU), Canada (CA), India (IN), Ireland (IE), New Zealand (NZ), Philippines (PH), South Africa (ZA), United Kingdom (UK), and United States (US).”

This add on will provide its users with auto-suggestions from Live Search right in the browser while they enter their your query.

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Live Search “Autosuggestions” On Firefox

It is not just about Microsoft.com or Msn.com that have an infinite number of URLs, infact a lot of sites are have unlimited URLs. So the question that now arises is how to optimize big sites?

Jeremiah Andrick over at the Live Search Webmaster blog is offering wonderful tips for optimizing your large sites for search!

His first tip: Canonicalization/ Normalization. That means exposing URL per piece of content to the engines.

What's next? Have a look at some of the optimization related problems that can occur due to multiple URLs and the conversions that should be made: :

• Add or remove the trailing /
  • http://www.mysite.com/ to http://www.mysite.com
• Remove the index or default
  • http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx to http://www.mysite.com
  • http://www.mysite.com/en/us/default.aspx to http://www.mysite.com/en/us
• Avoid CamelCase — convert your text to lower case
  • http://www.mysite.com/FooBar/ to http://www.mysite.com/foobar
• Remove query string variables or rewrite to readable URLs
  • http://www.mysite.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99&displaylang=en to http://www.mysite.com/downloads/en/family/ab99
• Remove Port Numbers
  • http://www.mysite.com:8080/ to http://www.mysite.com
• Avoid exposing secure HTTPS version
  • https://www.mysite.com/en/us/ to http://www.mysite.com/en/us

Read all of Andricks' recommendations, click here.

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Tips for Optimizing Large Sites By Live Search!

Check your inbox- latest headlines are flowing in!

That's the new feature by Windows Live Search.The service is called “News Alerts Service” and it will allow the users to have latest news item delivered to their email, either daily, twice daily or weekly.

How to set up the alert?

1. Go to news.live.com.
2. Sign in with your Live ID (or get one if you haven’t already).
3. From any page within news search (like the default page for top stories or the results page that hold a connection with a search), click the News alerts link.
4. Click Create alert.

The feature is just like Google News Alert, but with a hint of difference. Here, the users can choose top headlines or subject-specific news headlines according to their cup of tea. You just have to create a Windows LIVE ID for that!

• After receiving the news alerts, you can even unsubscribe the ones that are no longer useful!

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News Alerts Service By Windows Live Search!

Live Search will soon come up with an update to its Live Search Mobile app for Windows Mobile.

A lot of new and diverse facets will be added via this release. For all those users, who don't have a GSM- enabled phone, they will be able to find their desired location, with the help of the “Location detection tool,” that forms a part of one of the newly launched attributes. At the same time, it will enable the users to get maps and directions on their mobile phones.

The new release will further enable the users to speed up their searches with the help of “predictive query input” which is their second new addition.

The third accession is called "Bird's Eye" which will provide a 3D-like view in order to identify an entity in the best way possible. To download the application, just click on wls.live.com on your mobile phone or check out this website called: livesearchmobile.com.

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Live Search Mobile update for Windows Mobile

Discussion is on at WebmasterWorld that Live Search is crawling JavaScript with MSNBot-Media. Till now the news has not been confirmed by the official website, but certain practical examples are pointing towards the reality of these speculations.

incrediBILL, moderator at WebmasterWorld, stated that one of Live Search's bots was crawling through his JavaScript. And above all, the name of the bot is MSNBOT-MEDIA.

He said:

“I checked and these pages don't appear to have any references anywhere else on the web, nor should they being only accessible in javascript, so the only conclusion that I can draw is MSNBOT-MEDIA now has rudimentary understandings of javascript.”

Also, he noticed that it was accessing JavaScript files and AJAX functions.

“Now that I've had time to do a little more research I'm assuming that MSNBOT-MEDIA is looking for Ajax data. With many image galleries using javascript and flash these days they're probably trying to harvest that data.” he further added.

People believe that this step is logical enough and plays a very important role in building a quality media search engine. Following the trend, a lot of spiders are going to start doing this as well.

Forum discussion is going on at WebmasterWorld.

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Live Search Is Crawling JavaScript with MSNBot-Media