webDotWiz Online has a Space: MSN Search

Live image search - facial recognition, b&w, portrait

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 10:59:22 GMT

You can now search for images using three new filters:

face filtering, e.g. phil collins filter:face
portrait filtering, e.g. phil collins filter:portrait
black and white filtering, e.g. phil collins filter:bw

For the time being, we ve got to manually enter the filter: bit of the search but apparently that's going to change.

When you've done a search, remember to look over on the right-hand side to the list of people related to your search. You can spend a fair amount of time cross-searching...

See Dare's post and the Live Search team's post for more info.

Live Search Books now available

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 10:12:09 GMT

Live Search has expanded to Live Search Books (http://books.live.com) so you can now search books (mostly out-of-copyright ones) in various libraries around the world. Libraries currently searched are:

Cornell University
The American Museum of Veterinary Medicine
The British Library
The New York Public Library
The University of California
The University of Toronto

Others will be added lately.

Once the Welcome to Live Search Books banner appears, type a book name or word/phrase in the search box and click the search button. The page opens into two panes - on the left are results and a click on any of these opens the books' corresponding page in the right-hand side pane.

Once you've chosen a book from the results list, most often you'll be given the option to download the complete book (in PDF format so you can view it with Adobe's Reader or the much more compact PDF Foxit Reader).

Footnote: if books.live.com doesn't bring up the Live Search Books site, try this link.

Technorati tags: Live Search Books, Live Search

Put a Live Search box on your own site

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 23:49:40 GMT

The Live Search team announced the other day that we webmasters can add a Windows Live Search box to our own site. It's easy to do - there's a basic version and an advanced version, the latter allowing visitors to your site to either search your site or search the web. As well, you can add your own search macros if you want.

For more info, see the Live Search Siteowner pages.

webDotWiz will write up more help on the webDotWizards space when time allows because all the webDotWizard webmasters will be shown how to add the advanced version to their sites.

This is what the advanced search box looks like when a user wants to search webDotWiz Online:

Technorati tags: Live search, live search box, site owners

Try this - Live search

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 09:52:18 GMT

1. Go to http://www.google.com/ (just click the link to open a new browser window)

2. Type in "search" (without the quotes)

3. Click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

via Nigel Parker.

(Also posted on Living on Waranga Basin)

Technorati tags: Google, search

Search macros speed up your searching

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:04:30 GMT

You want to search the web for some video games. Normally you'd go to your search page, say Live Search (search.live.com), and type in "video games" (using quote marks tells the search engine we're looking for both words together on web pages), and sit back while a few million results are returned - then you've got to lo plough your way through pages and pages of results hoping you'll find what you want.

Wouldn't it be easier if you could search the main video games sites and peruse the results?

You could achieve this by clicking on More on the toolbar in Live Search and create your own macro to carry out the job. To save you time, the Live Gallery has plenty of macros, including one to search for video games.

There's a video games one on this Live Gallery page. Notice all the sites that it's going to search (the main ones on the Net that talk about video games), omitting any forums it comes across.

Try this video games macro by clicking on the Add to Live.com button.

After you see how this one returns its search results, choose a macro that fits in better with your interests.

Technorati: Live+Search, Live+Search+macros, macros

Live search is now... yep, you guessed it... live

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:14:15 GMT

Several Windows Live services have moved from beta/trial version to full release version - Live Search (search.live.com) is one of them.

Firstly, search.live.com is just one way to get to Live Search. You also have the choice of going to your personalised Live.com page (www.live.com) and choosing Search only from the top right corner. Alternatively, if you've finished searching and you want to get to your Live.com page, choose Personalised page.

On search.live.com you can choose to search the web, search for images or news or do a local search.

The fun searches are for Images and Local map/directions searching - just click the appropriate button to make you choice before clicking the search button.

Once your result page opens, you'll see more choices - Videos, More (Academic search and search macros - more on the latter in a couple of days), and sometimes QnA to see whether other people have answered a query similar to what you're searching on.

Try an images search on Tom Hanks. You can adjust the slider to view larger/smaller sized images, or use the drop down list to only look at images of a certain size. Somewhere's there's supposed to be a scratchpad but webDotWiz hasn't found it yet - . Hover your mouse over any image to get a better look - very neat.

And you've noticed that Windows Live Search is now simply called Live Search -

Technorati: Live+search, Windows+Live, search

Windows Desktop Search version 2.6.5

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 02:11:35 GMT

Windows Desktop Search (WDS) has been updated to version 2.6.5. If you're running IE7 beta 2 preview, installing WDS will require the removal of MSN Search Toolbar. However, you're then able to install the Windows Live Toolbar which is a refinement of the MSN Search toolbar. Live Toolbar has the phishing filter, the same links to mail (Hotmail or Windows Live Mail) and Spaces. As well Live toolbar has the Onfolio tool to save text and site addresses which you want to refer to later for research purposes. There is also a direct link to Live Local, the mapping service.

Search Preview Add-in for MSN Search Toolbar

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 10:00:50 GMT

Another add-in for your MSN Search toolbar and one that webDotWiz will make use of.

The Search Preview Add-in adds a thumbnail of the site alongside each search result. Roll your mouse over the thumbail to get an enlarged view of the web page.

You can download the trial version from the MSN Search Toolbar add-ins page.

Talking about Microsoft and the British Library work together to make 25 million pages of content available to all

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 08:12:32 GMT

The link below is to the British Library's press release announcing their collaboration with Microsoft to digitise and make 100,000 books available through MSN Search.

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Microsoft and the British Library work together to make 25 million pages of content available to all
Microsoft and the British Library will work together to digitise around 100,000 out-of-copyright books and deliver search results for this content through the new MSN Book Search service help people find precisely what they're looking for on the web. MSN Search will launch an initial public beta offering next year.
Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, said, “This partnership helps us fulfil our vision of promoting ready access to our collection for everyone who wants to use it. This is great news for research and scholarship and will give unparalleled access to our vast collections to people all over the world: the items digitised will be available to anyone, anywhere and at any time.”

Talking about MSN Search's WebLog : MSN Book Search and the British Library

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 04:57:17 GMT

MSN Search will be working with British Library to digitise about 100,000 books over the next year. All these books will then become searchable, that is, we'll be able to find information rather than just read.

Click the link below for the complete story by Thirumalai Anandanpillai (Product Planning, MSN Search, On behalf of the MSN Search Content Acquisition Team).

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MSN Search's WebLog : MSN Book Search and the British Library

Talking about MSN Search Announces MSN Book Search

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 10:01:13 GMT

Project Gutenberg has been a resource for a number of years that enables visitors to its site to download from a selection of over 16,000 books. But from the press release below, you can see that MSN Search, in collaboration with the Open Content Allianace, is considering a more far-reaching project to enable us all to access more reference material on the web.

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MSN Search Announces MSN Book Search

From the press release MSN Search Announces MSN Book Search we learn

SAN FRANCISCO — Oct. 25, 2005 — MSN Search today announced its intention to launch MSN^® Book Search, which will support MSN Search’s efforts to help people find exactly what they’re looking for on the Web, including the content from books, academic materials, periodicals and other print resources. MSN Search intends to launch an initial beta of this offering next year. MSN also intends to join the Open Content Alliance (OCA) and work with the organization to scan and digitize publicly available print materials, as well as work with copyright owners to legally scan protected materials.
"With MSN Book Search, we are excited to be working with libraries worldwide to digitize and index information from the world’s printed materials, taking another step in our efforts to better answer people’s questions with trusted content from the best sources," said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of MSN Search at Microsoft Corp. "We believe people will benefit from the ability to not just view a page, but to easily act on that data in contextually relevant ways, both online in the search experience and in the applications they are using."
MSN will first make available books that are in the public domain and is working with the Internet Archive to digitize the material. MSN will then work to extend its offering to other types of offline content. The digitized content will primarily be print material that has not been copyrighted, and Microsoft will clearly respect all copyrights and work with each partner providing the information to work out mutually agreeable protections for copyrights.

If you're keeping track that means all three major search engines (Yahoo!, Google and MSN) have announced book search engines. So far only Google is facing lawsuits from publishers because it plans to digitize copyrighted works unless the copyright holders explicitly opt-out. Expecting that publishers and authors will have to go to each search engine vendor that plans to offer a book search service to explicitly tell them not to redistribute their works seems to be putting an unnecessary burden on copyright holders and runs counter to the spirit of copyrights.
The lawsuits around Google Print may turn out to be an interesting turning point in how copyright is viewed in the digital era.

Talking about MSN Search's WebLog : MSN Search Plugins for Firefox

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 10:11:37 GMT

MSN Search have released a plug-in for Firefox users so they have access to MSN Search as a choice of search engines in their browser. More on the link below.

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MSN Search's WebLog : MSN Search Plugins for Firefox