Interesting Perspective on how IRONY and Personality  shaped the future of Microsoft and its main players 


http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060330.html

http://reddit.com/info?id=3smn

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/02/2013246

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

Windows Live, is not Windows. Rather, it's "Internet based personal services to bring together your digital world." But Windows Live isn't MSN.com either. It sounds basically like a new Web portal.

Office Live sounds similar, but business focused and easy to integrate with Microsoft Office (but you don't need Office to use Office Live). Some of these Live services will be free, others will be subscription-based.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/001046 .html
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1267 623

Here is a free 30 minute Audio Interview with Web 2.0 founder

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail795.html

Brin says that Google is not planning to launch a web-based office productivity suite.

MSN search IS becoming a MAJOR player - so this video interview with the Engineer and Developer/ Quality Control ALGO team is very revealing for SEOs and Webmasters 

One interesting tidbit is that the overhyped "neural network" may be nothing more than the DirectHit Click Popularity re-hash (notice the "no comment")

The below link code in their SERPs relays all the information about that click to MSN - Can you figure out this code - it really is quite Revealing

http://g.msn.com/9SE/1?http://search-engines-web.com/&&DI=293&IG=7e638b0e044946308410b3e9e1a662a2&POS=9&CM=WPU&CE=6&CS=AWP&SR=6 


Here is the related Blog and ONE HOUR interview with their Engineers

http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/10/22/483846.aspx

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=128677

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/apps/ve/katrina.htm

many members of the Virtual Earth and MSNBC teams volunteered a lot of hours to get a flyover application together to assist families displaced by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It allows them to get a low altitude aerial view of their homes and neighborhoods.

http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/09/16 /469216.aspx

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http://www.viavirtualearth.com/pdc/pdc2005.htm

now at PDC we have released a version of the control for use in commercial applications. You can read details of the new licensing terms at our developer site,"

http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/news_and_press/press_2005-09-14.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/

Professional Developer Conference 2005 (PDC05), Eric Rudder, senior vice president, Servers and Tools at Microsoft Corp., introduced Microsoft® Expression, a family of professional tools for the design and production of enhanced user experiences and rich content for the Web and Windows Vista™ platform. The announced products and their code names are Expression code-named "Acrylic Graphic Designer," a painting, illustration and effects tool for creating graphic designs; Expression code-named "Sparkle Interactive Designer," a user-interface design tool for modern application development using the Windows® Presentation Foundation; and Expression code-named "Quartz Web Designer," a layout and design tool for creating Web sites.

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=1050

Mark Manasse and his colleagues from Microsoft Research have contributed some clever ideas to foil companies who skew search results to get their products noticed. You'll benefit from their research by getting improved and more relevant search results from MSN Search.

"We're able to identify about three-quarters of the spam pages on the Web using statistical analysis," said Manasse.

According to Manasse, the industry of search engine optimizers (SEOs) has emerged to meet the demand from commercial Web sites to get their pages to show up among the high-ranking search results

Web spam is eventually going to identify itself by virtue of doing something that causes the links to be deemed more relevant than they should be." Then the researchers can spot the methods they use and introduce countermeasures.

Manasse and his colleagues Marc Najork and Dennis Fetterly, studied about 151 million pages on the Web. Shingling is a complex process that analyzes the words on a page, and finds out if there are no differences, small differences, or large differences. It does this so quickly that it can suppress duplicate pages on-the-fly for every new search query.

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=388

"The system essentially uses simple words as statistical clues," explains Robertson. "The words may be standardized in some limited ways, for example, "aardvarks" mapped to "aardvark," but no serious linguistic processing is done. We rely on the fact that in the context of a large volume of text, some relatively simple statistical patterns provide very powerful selection criteria. Treating the clues statistically means that no single word is an absolute criterion -- each word may contribute something towards an overall assessment of the likelihood

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=1051

The iterative process that Cucerzan and Brill developed matches your misspelled word to a closely related word, and from there to the next best match, and so on until a reasonable search string is found. Here's an example:

Each iteration is based on people's tries at spelling the words in this query correctly, with the last iteration containing the word forms used by the majority of Web searchers.

Because these spell checking methods are based on query sub-strings statistics, they can easily handle misspelled queries such as 'britnet spear inconcert'. The program would break the string into sub-strings of 'britnet spear' and 'inconcert' and then correct the sub-strings to 'britney spears' and 'in concert.'

http://beta.msn.com/

Very Clean and White Space - oriented - gone are the navy blue theme and Images

The anticipation of the innovative MSN search is not being met by the features of the Beta version.

Of course,  they are still in Beta, but shouldn't there be a hint of what would be so innovative.

The SERPs certainly are not breaking any new ground in relevancy.

The add ons - while nice - certainly are not any different than what is found in Yahoo or Google,

It will be interesting to see if this can actuall beat Google or Yahoo.