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Core Improvements In Live Search 
By: Eric Enge 2007-10-05 This post will provide some more info on the September 26, 2007 Searchification event that Microsoft put on. In particular, this post will focus on the core search engine improvements part of the presentation. I will provide some brief comments on each announcement, as well as pictures of the speakers.
1. Introduction by Brad Goldberg. Brad Goldberg, general manager of the Windows Client Product Management Group at Microsoft, who manages the search team from a business perspective, started things off for the event: Brad spoke about data that indicates some of the basic problems with search. For example, 40% of search queries fail to provide an answer, and 50% of these queries require refinement before an answer is found. People find that getting what they want requires a high level of cost and commitment. One of the more interesting things he spoke about was the search market data share data from comScore:
Based on this data, he stated that Microsofts focus is on getting more repeat queries from their user share, or doing a better job of delighting their current customers. 2. Overview by Satya Nadella. Satya Nadella, Group VP, Search and Advertising Platform Group, was up next and dug into a bit more detail about Microsofts areas of focus for this update: 
Note that one of the comments Satya made in a pre-show discussion I had with him was that the Microsoft infrastructure is finally getting caught up, and this is enabling them to do much more with their search product. The last major update that Microsoft did was in September of 2006. Microsoft has been doing rolling updates through the year, including a number of performance and relevance changes. In this release, several of Microsofts search products were affected:
Next up was a summary of customer feedback: 
The data in the above pie chart was based on an analysis of user click behavior. The sidebar point about relevance was based on an analysis of over 10,000 feedback submissions. Given the preponderance of concerns about relevance, Microsoft did some further research to get a better understanding of the nature of the relevance concerns. This broke out as follows: 
Based on what Microsoft learned from these analyses, they invested in 6 major areas:
Demos of Improvements. At this point in the presentation, Ramez Naam joined Satya to run some live demos: 
Ramez demoed a variety of search queries and their results. Here are some of the queries that were demonstrated:
the office - search engines normally strip off the from this query, but many users are actually looking for the TV show. This now comes up in Live Search results. IL soccer - The new Live Search understands that in this query that IL means Illinois. Ultimately, the objective of this effort was to increase their search results relevance. Microsoft then did some testing with live human subjects to assess relevance. Each participant was trained on how to assess relevance. They had this group do a large number of searches and presented them with results in format where they did not know which search engine the results were from. Net-net, the results of this testing showed a dramatic improvement in Microsofts relevance scores. Here is a chart showing the details: 
In summary, it is clear that Microsoft made a lot of improvements to their core search results. The real tale of the tape will emerge from tens of millions of searches done by real users. That said, a number of different issues were presented, and Microsoft has addressed them, so this presents good progress. The other concern I would have would be is whether the underlying strategy of trying to capture more market share from their existing users will work. After all, is the reason they capture the initial search, but not the follow-on searches, simply because users know which search engine they already trust? This could provide some resistance to getting comfortable with Live Search results. However, I can tell you that I am more intrigued by Microsofts improvements and Live Search then I have ever been. I know I will be doing some testing of it on an ongoing basis. Comments Tag: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing, Search Engine Algorithms, Microsoft Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Reddit |  Furl Have a bookmark! - 
About the Author: Eric Enge has established a reputation as a leading search engine marketing expert, and is the author of the Ramblings about SEO blog. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic, Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide. |
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