September 30, 2007
The New Live Search
Microsoft’s Live Search had a major update this week.
Live Search (also known as Windows Live Search and MSN Search) went through a metamorphosis this week, the main changes being the following:
The index has quadrupled in size
The numbers are not official, so we do not know how many documents are indexed by Live. Mary Jo Foley believes the number is 20 billion.
The ranking algorithm has been “enhanced”
This means that it has been tweaked to sort out spam and to deliver more relevant quality sites. Microsoft says that it is using user “click-stream data to inform ranking and relevancy processes”. This means, for instance, that they track how long a searchers spends on a site before returning til the Live search result page, looking for more.
Vannessa Fox reports that the improved ranking algorithms use neural networking ranking that are loosely modeled from biological neural networks.
There is now an autospell correction
If Microsoft believes you have misspelled a word, it will suggest an alternative.
Live has improved its stop word handling
Meaning that it will ignore common words like “the”, “an”, “of” etc.
Filed under Search Engines by PSKoch
