Yes, that's an odd title, let me explain.
We've been working on returning the very best search results for your intent, not just for the particular search terms that you happen to have chosen as a vehicle to transmit that intent. There's an important difference there and it's been our focus for quite some time.
For example, let's suppose that you've decided to move to the state of Arizona. You'd like to double check that how hot it gets there so you search for hottest temperature in the state of az. In this case, the intent of the query was different than the search terms entered: it would be unfortunate if a particularly good result was excluded from the results simply because it contained the term Arizona instead of the abbreviation AZ.
In the new release of Live Search we've made a number of improvements in this area of more deeply understanding user intent.
AutoSpell Correction
The first example of this is our new AutoSpell feature.
If we are absolutely, completely, totally, "no doubt about it" confident you misspelled one of your search terms, we automatically deliver a page that includes spell-corrected results, rather than a page of misspelled results accompanied by a "Did you mean _______?" link at the top.
For example, there's this pizza place near Microsoft called Pagliacci Pizza that is fantastic. The problem is that I can never remember the correct spelling of the place. My misspelled attempts are usually something along the lines of Pagliaci Pizza, Pagliaccis Pizza, or Paggliacci Pizza...
With AutoSpell correction I get the correct result the first time, regardless of the misspelling. Instead of being two clicks away from pizza, I'm just one. Being two clicks away just keeps people hungry, rather than satisfying their intent!
In the (hopefully) rare case that you ever see a mistaken correction in our AutoSpell feature, we provide a recourse link at the top of the page to enforce your original spelling.
Stemming
Another improvement in the "Do what I mean, not what I say" category is stemming. Stemming means matching on the "stem" (or root) of the word rather than the exact word.
For example, users told us that the search half price book Redmond returned horrible results. Searching for half price books Redmond produced much better results. In our new release of Live Search, searches for half price book Redmond automatically include results with books in them as well.
Our team knew that tackling stemming would give us the improvements we needed for searches like these. But we had to be careful, because you can't just stem all the time-you have to be smart about it. An example of this is the word cable. When you search for "cable," you could be looking for information on cable TV providers. When you search for "cables", you could be looking for power, telephone, or network cables.
We're really happy with the improvements that stemming has made in Live Search. Like everything else in the product, we will continue to tune and tweak things to give our users the best experience.
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Wow...what an innovation. Google has only been doing this for about, oh, 2 years.
Google does not give you the option to stick with the precise spelling you entered. That's a nice UI touch, I can see.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web....
It is nice to see you are striving in the right direction. Hope you begin to succeed more often soon.
You've done an incredible job of improving results and coverage, which ultimately makes Live Search more competitive with Google.
I find I cannot say enough good things about it. You've improved your service more toward pure search than toward pure techniness.
Keep going in that direction and don't worry about what toxic people say.
Is this new fearutre applied for only US so far?
When does it come to Japan?
Hii..
I wanna knw.. whn will.. new Live 2.0 available in India....
what about placing the results in the correct importance order, improve the "page rank" formula? are you working on that too?
Hi, you are doing a great job.
Live Search is sending to my site a lot of traffic, just behind Google.
Keep Working Hard. Congrats!
Quote:
Live Search is sending to my site a lot of traffic, just behind Google. Quote.
Lucky for you...For some reason all my trafic suddenly stopped ??
Im glad to see the updates ive always loved msn and been a big fan..
I hope it gets better and better and id like to see more advertiseing options for publishers like the google adsense i think msn would be able to compete with google in that market.
@Mike G: Good point. In fact, when we launched our engine, we knew there was some catching up that we were going to have to do - no two ways about it. Given that, a more interesting or telling metric may be how long it took us to go from inception to having this functionality, rather than the year we (or others) launched it. In the long run, we think that's a more revealing/interesting metric. :)
@Tom D: Thanks for the positive feedback on our team's 'recourse' link that enforces your original spelling - much appreciated!
@Japanese SEO & Nikhil: I can't yet reveal an exact date on when this functionality will be available in Japan and India other than ASAP is our goal. We want to get this functionality in your markets, and all markets worldwide.
Thanks for taking the time to send us feedback on our new "Do what I mean, not what I say" initiative.
Luke DeLorme
Program Manager
Search Relevance - Microsoft
Another improvement, yay. I really hope the this search engine will become much more competitive with google since live has a lot of catching up to do. Using the stems sounds like a good idea to me.
You guys are creeping up to a very interesting concept by discussing relevance, equivalences and stemming. Have you thought about the importance of managing your terminology for multiple languages as part of SEM? Companies have multiple language websites for one reason: targeted customer acquisition. Therefore, you cannot simply perform a 1:1 language 'translation' of keywords that support your corporate branding -- you must instead find the *equivalent* for the term from the source language into the target language. "King Arthur's Round Table" is a completely different concept than a "round table" discussion. Now translate that into French and see how much trouble it gets you!
I would love to discuss this further with Microsoft Live Search. Any takers?
Christie Fidura
Senior Product Marketing Manager for Terminology, SDL