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Microsoft restructuring its Search Business Group to ad a new group that will focus towards the commercial search. Jeff Kelisky CEO of multipath will be General Manager of this group. This new commercial search group focus on Live Search cashback, MSN Shopping, local, consumer mapping, Virtual Earth and mobile. Kelisky will report to Search Business Group GM Brad Goldberg in Redmond but will remain based in London.

Brad Goldberg,  GM Search business group

We are increasing our focus on commercial search, including changes to the search leadership team and engineering team and in order to lead this market we need to bring all find, explore and commerce needs together. (Jeff) will direct this team to ensure Microsoft continues to innovate and deliver so that consumers choose us to find local information and services.

Microsoft currently have only 1.8% share in Europe search market and working very hard to increase search market percentage. Microsoft is also building a research and development center for search technology in Europe. According to zdnet blog Microsoft views maps as “one axis for search.” Other axis may be Enterprise Search and Natural-language search.

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Microsoft Live Search is rolling out Olympics-related features, which will all be live by the end of the day on Friday

• Olympics 2008 news scope, available in Live Search News at http://news.live.com gives readers up-to-date coverage with additional elements such as Olympics 2008 news images.
• Olympian xRank, available at http://xrank.live.com gives fans a way to track the popularity of their favorite athletes. For example, Michael Phelps jumped from number 19 to number one in the matter of 24 hours, yesterday to today.
• Olympics Videos are available at http://video.live.com when customers search “Olympics.
• The Live.com Homepage will rotate Olympics images in the background for the duration of the games.
• Athlete Instant Answer will feature profiles of Olympians as searchers type in the first and last names of the athlete in search queries. For instance, fans can search “Shawn Johnson” or “LeBron James. 
• Medal Count Instant Answer will provide an all up medal count by country, sport, or by country and sport when searchers type in Olympics-related keywords in search queries. For instance, fans can search terms like “swimming” or “China gymnastics.”

All the features will be available in the US, while Athlete Instant Answer and Medal Count Instant Answer will be available in select countries and regions.

Thanks neowin

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I find some real good search results of last month while searching the web. I am sharing all of those search engine data with our reader.

Top search providers, ranked by total searches. Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the provider.
Top 10 Search Providers for June 2008, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)

Source: Nielsen Online, MegaView Search

In June, Google Sites retained its lead in the U.S. core search market capturing 61.5 percent of the searches conducted, down slightly from 61.8 percent in May. Google was followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.9 percent, up from 20.6 percent in May), Microsoft Sites (9.2 percent, up from 8.5 percent in May), Ask Network (4.3 percent), and AOL LLC (4.1 percent).

Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.Americans conducted 11.5 billion searches at the core search engines, representing a 7-percent increase versus May. Google Sites handled more than 7 billion core searches (up 6 percent from May), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.4 billion (up 9 percent), and Microsoft Sites with more than 1 billion (up 15 percent).

Source : comScore Core Search Report

NEW YORK, NY – July 15, 2008 – Google accounted for 69.17 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending June 28, 2008, Hitwise announced today. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.62, 5.46 and 4.17 percent respectively. The remaining 42 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.70 percent of U.S. searches.

Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending /28/08, 5/31/ 2008, 6/30/2007 from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.  * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.

Source: Hitwise

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Microsoft bundled a new writing assistance tool in their Live Search.ESL (English as a Second Language) Assistant currently noting  more then a prototype and ESL currently focusing on limited number of mistakes

The ESL Assistant uses statistical models to suggest corrections for a number of common learner error patterns that are not currently supported by the proofing tools in Microsoft Office products. The service also tries to help users judge whether a suggestion truly represents an improvement by showing real-life examples returned by a web search

ESL Assistant deploys advanced statistical models in order to address and correct uncharacteristic mistakes. At the same time, the tool is intimately connected to Live Search, and each suggestion is also performed as a search in order to offer the user conclusive examples after the error is corrected. Additionally, Microsoft is intent on offering the tool as an add-in for the Office 2007 System, in an effort to make up for the limitations of the grammar checker.

In its present form, the service is unapologetically experimental (‘pre-alpha,’ despite the beta label). The range of error types that it corrects is still small, it does not capture everything, and it sometimes gets things wrong. Work to improve error detection accuracy and coverage is ongoing; we expect to roll out new modules and updates as the service matures. The present interface certainly does not represent what one would expect to see if this service were some day fully integrated into a shipping product. With the current prototype, we will be gathering data about where the service succeeds and where it does not, to help inform future directions of development

Some features of the ESL Assistant service include:

• Corrections for common ESL error types found in non-native English writing but not supported in by the Office grammar checker. More information about the specific kinds of error patterns that are supported can be found in the ESL Assistant Help (FAQ) page and on the team website. 

• Implementation as a web service, which permits the deployment of huge statistical models to identify possible error locations.

• Automatically generated searches to assist users by retrieving real-world contextual examples from the web.

• A downloadable add-in for Outlook 2007, allowing mail text to besent to the ESL Assistant web site for checking.

• An inline thesaurus feature that proposes alternative words appropriate to the context.

• An initial pass though Microsoft Office grammar and spell checking, that can be turned on by a checkbox, to ensure more comprehensive error coverage.

• Localized pages for users in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian markets (or if you set your default language in IE to one of these).

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Internet has vast amount of information and there are a lot of way to search this information using different search engines, blogs, forum and many other. It’s important find a right way to search information on Internet. I found some tips to search more effectively over the internet.

Use Instant Search Box

Most browsers now include a built in search box, that will you to search internet more effectively as compare to using search engine web page. Instant Search Box cache your search queries so you won’t have to type the same query again and again. Users can also multiple search engines to Instead search box, so you can search multiple search engines.

Use Address Bar Built In Search

Type find or go in Internet Explore and then type the keyword or URL that you are looking for, Internet Explorer will do the task pf searching for you. This feature is not available in Firefox.

Use Different Search Providers

All search engines use different search algorithms to index content. To get a better result always use different search engines to search information over internet. If one search engine is not able to give desired result then go for some other search engine.

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Microsoft Search website Live.com has added pictures to it’s background. These added pictures to live search opens a lot of opportunity to Live Search page to use it for special occasions, users can personalize live search page with their favorite image. Microsoft confirmed to SearchEngine Land that its still in testing, so if you don’t fins any picture while opening Live Search page then don’t worry.

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