It’s that time of the year again: The office pools are going, the sports bars are full, and you’re digging out the colors of your alma mater. Yes, March Madness is already in full swing.
While not all of our engineers are huge basketball fans, we are huge fans of our Instant Answers. This is a feature that gives … well, an Instant Answer to a query that is intended to discover a specific piece of information. With so many game times and scores to keep track of, we couldn’t think of a better way to make you happy than to deliver some Instant Answers on college hoops, just in time for the Sweet 16. Simply type in “NCAA tournament”, “March Madness”, or “college basketball” and you will get the latest and greatest information on the tournament right on the search page.
You can even type in your favorite team’s name to get the team’s record and latest results. Here’s an example for the Duke Blue Devils.
Enjoy and let us know what other Instant Answers you would like to see in the future!
Theo Vachovsky, Instant Answers Product Manager, Live Search
PingBack from http://www.searchenginejournal.com/live-search-rolls-out-instant-and-active-answers/9472/
I tried out these searches but I got no results with additional info like you did.
I just tried it and works great. How do you decide what topics will give extra info/links.
Really a great information . I tried it and found very interesting.
@Gunnar - Please check your language and country settings ( top right of the home page) . The NCAA Instant Answer is only for certain markets.
Thanks
Theo
@ Theo Vachovsky . can u plz tel me why most of the features are only for US. Are ur team only considering only US in this world.?
Beautifully done! I tried it and found very interesting. Thanks very much.
Thank you for your feedback and interest. For this Instant Answer we focused on the US because the NCAA tournament is US based, however we are always looking at expanding our Instant Answers to as many markets as possible. We’ll be sure to update the blog when we have new features to share.
I've a suggestion for Live Search that can make users come to Live.com daily. How about making available the background image on Live.com (US) page as a JPEG high-res wallpaper?
Great job BUT I still find it hard to recommend Live Search to my colleagues. What does Live Search do that other search engines can't do? IMHO, nothing.
I really believe that Microsoft should focus on building a search engine that helps people in more diverse situations including work. Why can't there be an instant answer with a chart of historical LIBOR rates that I can automatically insert into a Microsoft Office Document? There are so many databases full of statistics that workers and students use on a daily basis that it really makes sense to mine them and create and easy solution that is integrated with the Office suite. I am absolutely positive that I could recommend Live Search to colleagues if it had that type of functionality. In additon, I am fairly certain some would actually switch. Ditto for students, government workers, etc..