We're excited to announce that we've reached an agreement to acquire Powerset , a San Francisco-based search and natural language company. Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research. More importantly,

Now all of eBay's "Buy it Now" offers will be eligible for cashback rewards . With eBay's expansive catalog of products, from jewelry to electronics, you'll start to see more cashback ads appearing in our search results. That means more ways for you to save. You'll see three primary differences between this user experience and other cashback user experiences: There's an eBay ad with a cashback gleam )the cashback icon in the image here(.

One of the most exciting developments we've had in the last year was the success of our inaugural Search and Give program where your queries helped to raise more than $250,000 for local schools and non-profits. Over the course of the year the program generated cash donations for more than 20,000 organizations ranging from schools to non-profits such as Doctors Without Borders and ASPCA )The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals(.

We at Live Search are pleased to announce another collaboration with Yahoo and Google aimed at making webmasters' lives easier. Webmasters have long used the Robots Exclusion Protocol )REP( to control how search engines access and display their content. The REP offers an easy and efficient way to communicate with search engines, and is currently used by millions of publishers worldwide. Over the past few years,

Has this ever happened to you? You search online for information and click a promising link only to get an error page staring back at you: These generic 404 error pages leave you stranded, with no option but to click the back button and start over, or just give up altogether " not very helpful. We thought about this problem and realized that we had all the pieces to offer something much more useful.

With today's HP announcement and the recent MSN toolbar release, I want to discuss our recent moves in the toolbar space. Overall, these distribution deals come down to three things: 1. Live Search is ready for primetime These types of deals require a search engine that can stand on its own, as we all know how easy it is to switch to another search engine. Sure, Live Search has room to improve,

Check it out: We realize that often you just need to get a sense of what your query is about. Wikipedia is great for that " you can learn enough from the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article to start you out on the right path. For Wikipedia results, we now show a good portion of the first paragraph and a few links from the table of contents. You can see more about the topic right there and see what else the article offers. We hope you learn more,

Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs.

In our last release of Live Search for Windows Mobile we snuck in a little feature that allows users to send feedback directly to the engineering team. Since then, we've received tons of messages from users, many of which have been requests for new functionality. So what's the moral of the story? Ask, and you shall receive. Here's the list of some of the cool stuff we've built in response to user feedback.

Along with the release of our new search experience, we'd like to give some background into the design team and process that went into all the changes you see. You might not immediately think of design as being a critical part of a search product, but we think it is, and we have a growing team of designers, researchers, and developers who believe it, too. We have a growing, pro-design community here at Microsoft as well )only fitting to plug Microsoft Design (.

We've introduced our "Renaissance" release of Live Search QnA Beta . Our re-birth signifies the beginning of a new set of features that we'll continue to grow. We had three goals for this release: Focus on the QnA experience for new users. Encourage users to discover content and functionality in new ways. Highlight and award higher quality content by featuring members who are Top Contributors in given areas of expertise.

Just when you thought we'd stop at Celebrities, we now bring you )drum roll, please( Musicians ! xRank TM provides much more than just a way to track search trends " it's much more than that " it's a social commentary. With xRank TM Musicians we bring you the "mob's view" on what's shaking up the music industry. Sure, you've got Top 40s, billboard charts, and album sales, but what's more socially relevant than what you and your peers are searching for?

With the recent update of the Product Search experience ) http://search.live.com/products/ (, users can both research and find deals on products within Live Search. We've incorporated feedback from our users during the beta cycle and revamped the user experience, so now users can search and refine products by user opinions, brand, category, and price ranges. In addition, users can sort results by best user, expert rating, and price. Try it out, and send us your feedback !

We've just released the latest updates to our browser-based mobile search at m.live.com. One of our major efforts was to bring the power of product search to the convenience of a mobile phone. Think about how much time people spend shopping in brick-and-mortar stores " without the ability to do the product research they're accustomed to from their PCs. We took the great product search features from Live Search and made them easy to use on your mobile phone.

You wanted it, and now you have it. We've incorporated RSS feeds into the browse and search results experience. Subscribe and stay up to date with stories from all categories or for specific searches that you perform. We appreciate all the feedback that you've given us. We take it all seriously and do our best to respond. Try us out ) http://news.live.com/ (, and keep the feedback coming!

Those of you who search for stuff related to celebrities in your spare time raise your hands. C'mon now, don't be sheepish about it " we know the numbers, and we know you do it because we do it, too. Here's a thought. What if we could rank who you and all other Live Searchers like to search for? And then there was born a child unlike its siblings, a Live Search feature whose sole purpose was to be " gasp " FUN?! Check it out here .

When we were thinking about what searches we could improve on for this release, one thing we realized was that we actually were already getting a lot of searches right. A bunch of these were searches about a particular website you wanted. We returned the website, and you went there. Good times. But you didn't stay there. We did some research, and it turns out that after you made it to that page, you often tended to go to a few predictable places afterwards.

With the launch of the new browse experience for News ) http://news.live.com (, we now bring you the most relevant stories of the day bucketed in categories, such as top stories, local news, and business. At the same time, the news team has revamped the news results page to incorporate many new features to improve your search experience. Add us to your homepage , try it out, and give us your feedback!

In upcoming weeks some of us on the Live Search team will write about the changes we've made for this release across the Live Search family " from Web search through News, Video, and Products. As you put Live Search through its paces, let us know how it works for you. We'll do our best to read all your comments and answer the most common questions. We're building more than a search engine.

Our Maps team released new versions of Live Search Maps and Virtual Earth 3D yesterday. Here are some of the highlights: Directions and Traffic enhancements, including 1-Click directions )Party Maps!( Improved 3D cities )Las Vegas is shown below( Labels in Birds Eye imagery Exporting collections to your navigation or GPS device Tour enhancements, including HD movies Many more details are in Steve Lombardi's post over on the Live Maps/Virtual Earth blog - enjoy!