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!

With the winter in full swing, we're excited to announce snow reports for skiers and snowboarders! Search for any ski resort in the United States or Canada to get conditions before you head to the mountain. Links to the resort's site and a link to a map are also shown. Below is the report for Whistler )a great place in British Columbia(: Of course, we have to be careful about showing conditions only when they're relevant. For example,

The source code for www.tafiti.com is available! What is Tafiti? It is a search visualization website which brings a new user experience to researching )searching and storing results(. It was originally created by Microsoft to demonstrate Silverlight and the Windows Live Search APIs. Today the Windows Live Platform team announced the release of the Tafiti Search Visualization source code to CodePlex which means any developer can download, modify,

This week we're excited to announce that the Live Search Webmaster Center has moved out of its closed beta and we are now open for a public beta. In conjunction with this release we want to announce the creation of the Live Search Webmaster Center blog . In an effort to serve our webmaster community better we will be sharing information on how to improve your crawlablity and visibility.

Users have told us that product reviews are one of the most important research tools they use when shopping for products. The Internet has lots of reviews, but they're usually spread across many sites, which makes finding and reading all of them time consuming. Our team saw this as a great opportunity to help. As alluded to in a previous post, we recently launched a new feature that finds, analyzes and summarizes reviews from across the Web in a single place.

As far as I can tell, it's still not exceptionally well-known that the homepage for the Microsoft Zune is actually www.zune.net , and not zune.com. You'll find two things if you assume the latter: that there's no page for you at that address, and until recently, if you get forwarded on to your default search engine, chances are pretty good it won't help you figure out what went wrong. Our result page, in fact, had no results at all. Oops. In the past,

Software engineers tend to spend a lot more time working out at the driving range than they do the putting green. Left on our own we'd all be working on stuff like 3D Birds Eye navigation or robotic building modeling ; doing a local search for a coffee shop would require first getting strapped up like this Microsoft Researcher to the right so that we could predict where you wanted to find it and if you prefer decaf.

Continuing on with our "Do what I mean, not what I say", blog post from last time, here are some additional categories we tackled with this initiative. Equivalencies "We do really badly on the query ca chp " a coworker complained in one email. "Ca chp?" I thought. "What the heck does that mean?" It turned out it was pretty simple: "ca" was short for California and "chp" was short for California highway patrol . Obviously,

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.

On Monday the 15 th we also released a number of updates for our Live Search Mobile products , including: Voice input and gas prices in Live Search for Windows Mobile, A new beta for BlackBerry devices, and Improved mapping and directions in browser-based search for any mobile phone Details are below - please check them out and let us know what you think!

On Monday we announced a new service that brings the power of local search to any phone-and lets you access it just by speaking. Think about all the times you need to find quick local information: you're driving home from work and need make reservations at your favorite restaurant. Or maybe you're already downtown, and want to get movie times for theaters nearby along with a map and directions.

It's no surprise to anyone who uses the Web that shopping is one of the leading online activities. Many people use the Internet to research their next purchase or buy products online. We're here to help you find the product information you care about and make informed decisions. We've recently launched a richer experience when searching for products"from broad categories such as digital cameras to specific products such as Nikon d40 .