Microsoft now powered by MSN search

Microsoft is as much a content creator as it is a software platform developer. The key strength of any Microsoft developer is the huge amount of documentation made available by MS and non-MS sources.

this has lead to another problem of locating the relevant data. The traditional search on Microsoft.com has been poor and that has lead to popularity of resources like www.google.com/microsoft
personally, i have never used this route to searching microsoft.com resources. Google does have good search algorithms in place and was able to do a better job of searching many a times.

now microsoft has deployed its MSN Search technology to Microsoft.com for search (http://search.microsoft.com) . some features this brings to the table are:

More relevant search results :)

In addition to being more relevant, MSN Search results provide additional features such as search-term highlighting, so users can view search terms contextually, and spelling correction. Search results will continue to get better as we collect more query data over time and use it to tune the search engine.

Up to three editorial results will be displayed at a time. Editorial results relevant to the search query are labeled as Editor’s Choice. Editorial results that do not match the entire search term are displayed as Related Links.


Language radio buttons. Search will default to find results by language (not locale), with an option for users to find results in all languages. Scoping search by language will help international customers find more search results.


Search preferences. Multilingual customers can customize search by setting language preferences. These preferences will be remembered across user sessions and are automatically added below the search box and set as the user’s default scope.

Customer feedback page to collect customer feedback on specific queries and other comments. The feedback is used by MSN Search to improve relevance

Search for pages by language. The advanced search page enables users to search for results written in a specific language.

Search only these sites. These options have been switched from radio buttons to checkboxes. Customers can now search sites such as TechNet and KB at the same time.

Scope to part of Microsoft.com. This last option enables customers to enter a vroot or other directory/folder of their choice.

Change the display language. These links are persistent throughout the user experience and enable users to change the UI to another language. The second link is geo-targeting based on the user’s browser language setting.

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