Entries tagged with search - Channel 10

Live Search Now In Facebook

sarahintampa — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:16:00 GMT

In case you hadn’t heard, Live Search has just now been integrated into one of the biggest social networks in the world: Facebook. As Facebook announced on their blog, this is the “first step in giving you the ability to find content from across the web while using Facebook.” What this means is that when you’re doing a search on Facebook, you’ll now see the option to “Search Facebook” or “Search the Web.” This a big deal for those of you who live your entire lives on Facebook – now you can find the additional information you need without having to leave the site. One thing you may have noticed, as those over at VentureBeat did, the Facebook-flavored Live Search results appear somewhat different than the same query performed on www.live.com. According to a statement from Facebook, that’s because Facebook removes sponsored results (those results which people have paid for) in addition to using a few different filters, according to the company.

What’s really exciting, though, is that this is only the first step involving the integration of Live Search and Facebook, according to Agnus Norton, Senior Director, Live Search Product Management: “As we evaluate user feedback and results we'll explore additional ways to integrate Live Search more deeply into the Facebook experience.”

What do you think of the Live Search integration? You can communicate to the team directly on, where else? – their Facebook page.

Scott Prevost explains Powerset's hybrid approach to semantic search

JonUdell — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:12:00 GMT

Scott Prevost is General Manager and Director of Product for Powerset, the company whose semantic search engine was recently acquired by Microsoft. In this interview he describes the history of Powerset's natural language engine, and explains how it works as part of a hybrid approach to indexing, retrieval, and ranking.

Scott will expand on these topics in his keynote address at Web 3.0 in October.

Scott Prevost

JU: The notion of search enhanced by natural language understanding has a long history. I was just reading Danny Sullivan's rant about how he's been hearing about this for years, but it's never amounted to anything.

Of course, people are all over the map on this topic, but nonetheless you guys are doing certain demonstrable things, and working on other things. So I'd like to find out more about how the technology -- which was acquired from Xerox, where it had been worked on for a long time -- actually works. What you mean by natural language understanding, how you're applying the technology, and where this is going.

SP: Well, there are a lot of questions tucked in there, but maybe we can start with what we licensed from PARC, what was formerly Xerox PARC. They had been working for 30 years in a linguistic framework called LFG -- lexical functional grammar -- and they built a very robust parser. It's probably parsed more sentences than any other parser in the world.

What it allows us to do is take apart every document that we index, sentence by sentence, uncover its linguistic structure, and then translate that into a semantic representation we can encode in our index.

JU: Can you confirm or deny something that Danny Sullivan reported, which is that it takes on the order of two months to index Wikipedia one time using this method?

SP: [laughs] That's a very, very old number. It all depends on the number of machines, but we do it now on the order of a couple of days.

JU: And it scales linearly?

SP: Yes. And in fact we're working really hard to bring those numbers down. We have a very small data center right now. We're looking at what it takes to stand up a 2 billion document index, and it's absolutely attainable.

I think Danny Sullivan realized, when he wrote another article on the day we launched, that we're doing something different. He called us an understanding engine. It's not the case that we're just applying linguistic technology at runtime, by parsing the query and then trying to use the same old kind of keyword index for retrieval. We're actually doing the heavy lifting at index time.

We're actually reading each sentence in the corpus, pulling out semantic representations, indexing those semantic representations, and then at query time we try to match the meaning of the query to the meaning of what's in the document. That allows us to both increase precision and improve recall.

JU: When you say semantic representation, what it means -- or anyway what's evident in the current version -- is subject/verb/object triples, basically. That seems to be how things are organized.

SP: That's one small part of what the engine does. It's the part we've exposed in the user interface in a very direct way. But actually those are only three of several dozen semantic roles that we uncover at index time, and all of those roles go into selecting documents, and snippets of documents, when we present the organic results.

JU: Really? So even though the patterns aren't exposed in the advanced query interface, they're still used?

SP: That's right, they're still used.

JU: What would be an example of one of those other patterns, and how it's applied?

SP: So, you ask a question like: "When did Hurricane Katrina strike?" The 'when' is a certain kind of semantic role that we've indexed, separately from the subject, verb, and object. There are a number of other roles like that: location, time, other types of relationships.

JU: I saw a private demo, about a year ago, in which one of the most striking examples was something like: "Companies acquired by IBM between 1996 and 2003". At that point, I think the light bulb goes on in people's heads about what this could really be.

That class of query isn't exposed yet, but it's an example of what's possible, right?

SP: Absolutely. That's exactly the direction we're moving in. Initially most of the work we've done has been on the index side. Now we're starting to catch up on the query side, which allows us to complete the loop and do queries like that.

JU: The other piece that's visible on the website, in addition to the Wikipedia stuff, is the Freebase material that you've recently integated. That's an interesting case because there you can pull semantics directly from Freebase. So this becomes more of a query-time interface to something which is already structured and understandable.

SP: Yeah, that's right. Freebase is kind of like Wikipedia, except it's all structured data. Unlike with our core technology, which turns unstructured data into structured data, with Freebase we just go directly to the structured data. But it uses the same linguistic technology on the front end to parse the query, which then gets mapped into a Freebase database call.

But by using linguistic technology to parse the query, we're able to match very flexible ways of saying things. We don't have to imagine every possible way someone might ask for a particular piece of information. The linguistic engine takes care of a lot of that for us.

JU: That's why I can type in something like "Barack Obama's book" and get back the answer Dreams From My Father directly from Freebase.

So, what was the intent of including Freebase along with Wikipedia. What are you trying to show there?

SP: That the linguistic technology can be used with both structured and unstructured data. Freebase just has a lot of really great information.

One of the things about a natural language front end is that it encourages people to ask questions and expect answers. With the Freebase database, it's pretty easy to provide direct answers right at the top of the search results page, which users find to be a nice experience.

Of course you have to be very high-precision, so we've tuned the Freebase stuff for precision rather than recall.

JU: Tell me about the natural language landscape: the variety of approaches that exist, the style that you're using, how that compares to others, how all this fits into the history of the technology.

SP: The technology goes back a long way, three decades or so.

JU: Longer, actually.

SP: Yeah, really since the beginnings of AI people have been trying to use computers to understand and generate language. There have been a number of different approaches: purely symbolic approaches, statistical approaches. We really use a hybrid.

The Xerox technology uses a particular grammatical formalism, and we do use symbolic approaches to our semantic rules. But we also then put these semantic features into our index, and use machine learning and statistical approaches to retrieve and rank results.

It really is a combination. We try not to be religious about these things, but just use best of breed, and choose the right tools for the jobs we're doing.

JU: One of the things that Peter Norvig at Google is always saying is that the real secret to their success is vast quantities of data, and that in the end you don't really need AI, you just need lots and lots of data and the ability to crunch through it.

I assume you would argue that the natural language techniques are also helpful, and that as the quantity of data in your possession grows, the power that it brings to the table will also grow.

SP: Yeah. One thing we try to do with the natural language technology is give a leg up to the statistical and machine learning approaches. If you look at a search engine that just uses keywords, the information you have about the page is pretty slim.

We're trying to capture more information about each page that we index, which enhances our ability to retrieve and rank. For example, it allows us to retrieve documents where there are no keyword matches, but there's a good meaning match.

JU: For example?

SP: So, consider a query like: "What politicians were killed by disease?" Powerset will retrieve documents that don't include the words 'disease' or 'politician' or 'kill', but that are about particular politicians who died from particular diseases.

JU: Is the process of mapping generic terms to specific instances a hybrid of human editorial effort and statistical techniques?

SP: Yeah. We use things like WordNet, which is a giant dictionary or thesaurus of the English language that shows how various word senses relate to each other. We use that with some editing on our own. We also use machine learning techniques to figure out some word relationships, and which are most helpful in retrieval and ranking. So it really is a combination.

JU: When did you start this work?

SP: The company was founded three years ago, and I joined two years ago. But of course the work at PARC goes back 30 years.

JU: You obviously have an academic background in this field.

SP: Yeah, I have a Ph.D. in computation linguistics, as do probably about twenty other people at Powerset.

JU: What's your take on how this engine will start to surface through the various Microsoft online properties?

SP: The two areas where we can make a big impact are, first of all, improving core relevance, which is an absolute must for every search engine. And then also the user experience. Some of the technology -- and you start to see it in the Wikipedia search engine that we put out -- some of it really allows us to do different things in the presentation of these results. Thing that can save the user time, by getting the answer right on the search results page.

Our goal is to continue to work on improving relevance, and we've shown that by using these semantic features we can drive large relevance improvements, but there's still a lot of work to be done there.

JU: In that case, the improvements would be under the covers, the person using Live Search wouldn't know that you were contributing to the relevance of the result.

SP: That's correct. Another way it can happen is by creating a different quality of snippet or caption, things that highlight the parts that match the query instead of just bolding the keywords. Actually highlight the answer right there on the search results page, so you don't have to click through to determine if it's the right page.

JU: There's a related area called entity extraction, and there's been a lot of action there. For example there's a company called ClearForest, recently acquired by Reuters, which has put a lot of work into entity extraction. What's the story on that front?

SP: A lot of companies are working on this, we have our own in-house effort for name recognition and entity recognition, and this is of course really helpful as a kind of light semantic layer. But for us, it becomes deeper because we can start to relate all kinds of entities to one another, based on where we've seen them, and also with the help of things like Freebase.

To follow up on how you'll see the impact in things like Live Search, beyond the improvement in relevance and in the quality of snippet, I think you'll see features like related searches, other ways of presenting information similar to the Factz that are shown in our Wikipedia product, I think you'll see a lot more work on the instant answers, with a database that extends beyond Freebase.

Without committing to particular deliverables, these are the kinds of things I think you can expect to see. And you'll also continue to see growth on powerset.com, where we can be a bit more daring in terms of ways of presenting search results.

JU: Well thanks for your time. This has been interesting, and I'll be fascinated to see how things unfold over the next few years. I've got a feeling you'll have access to a pile of resources to work with...

SP: Yeah, we're really excited about it. As a startup, it's hard to build a full-scale web search engine. Having the resources available, and the really smart people at Live Search, is just a tremendous boost to us.

Integrate the Web Into Office With KallOut

sarahintampa — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:58:00 GMT

A new program called KallOut works with all Microsoft Office products to let you search the web right from within Office. After installing KallOut, an icon will appear in your system tray to show that it’s running. To use the program, just double-click or select any word or phrase from within any Microsoft Office program (Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Notepad, WordPad), Adobe PDFs, Facebook, even IE and Firefox. You’ll then see a small KallOut icon appear. From here, you can access a small pop-up menu that displays several different search options. You can choose from several different search providers including Google, Live Search, Yahoo Search, and Technorati. You can also search reference sites like Wikipedia and Dictionary.com. videos on YouTube, or photos on Flickr, and more.

What’s really interesting about KallOut is that it essentially brings the power of the web into traditional Microsoft Office software. One of the perks of using online office suites is that, by their very nature, they’re connected to the real-time information of the web. So for example, if you needed to pull up a stock quote in a spreadsheet, it was possible. However, for many people, especially those using Office software in a traditional business environment, the web office suites are just not robust enough, rich enough, or powerful enough for the tasks at hand. But with a simple add-in like KallOut, you no longer have to choose between easy access to the live web or feature-rich software – you can have both.

Here are some examples of Kallout in use:

Collaborative SearchTogether Plug-In Available

sarahintampa — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:46:00 GMT

Fresh from Microsoft’s Research Group comes a new IE7 plug-in called SearchTogether, which lets you browse the web with your friends. With SearchTogether, groups can chat while they search and annotate the results with comments and ratings via a thumbs up / thumbs down button. The plug-in can also be used to do “split searching,” which is when a set of search results is split among the team, with each user working on a subset of the results. All the activity – chat, queries, comments, and ratings – are saved so that group members can later return to the search session and view the results. If you want to try SearchTogether, you can download the plug-in from here.

Windows Search 4.0 Final Version

sarahintampa — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:13:00 GMT

Only a few months ago, Microsoft released the Technical Preview of Windows Search 4.0, a new standalone search tool for Windows XP, Vista, and Server 2003. Now, the final version of Windows Search has arrived. It this version, there have been several improvements, including support for indexing encrypted files, reduced effect on Exchange, better performance, per-user Group Policy settings, as well as support for several new Enterprise Group Policy objects that I.T. admins can use when customizing their deployments of Windows Search 4.0 on their company’s computers. To learn more or download the software, go here and choose the right version for your OS.

Expanded Wikipedia Results in Live Search

sarahintampa — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:23:00 GMT

The Live Search team has just announced a change to the search results that will now show more of a Wikipedia entry than before. This is a great new feature since many times when you’re doing a search, you just need a quick answer and Wikipedia is usually the link you click to read the info you need. So now in the Live Search results, there’s a good portion of the first paragraph available from the Wikipedia article under the link to Wikipedia. Do you love it or hate it? Let the team know. Personally, I’ve found it useful enough to make Live Search my Wikipedia search engine of choice.

Looken' Lets You Search Outlook

sarahintampa — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:21:00 GMT

Recently, Xobni has been in the news for their “inbox as a social network” Outlook plugin (see our review here), which can help you better manage your email. But apparently, they were just the start of a new trend of plugins that help you deal with information overload. Now, there’s a new application called Lookeen, which can also help you get control of the inbox by allowing you to easily search for and find emails and other related files. Lookeen searches through your inbox, public folders, archives on Exchange, Notes, and your Calendar. For advanced users, it also allows for the use of specific query syntaxes like “AND” or “OR” or + / – and a lot more. The real question is, do you want a more social inbox (Xobni) or a more searchable one (Lookeen)? For those that said the latter, Lookeem may be worht a look. (via VentureBeat)

Search Share for Facebook

sarahintampa — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:36:00 GMT

A Live Search powered Facebook app called Search Share lets you search for all kinds of information that you can then share with your Facebook friends. Results for Search Share can include videos, images, web pages, news, and more. But Search Share isn't just a way to see traditional search engine results within Facebook, you can also preview the content and select the results you want via drag-and-drop in order to share them with your friends.

The items you want to share are dropped into a box at the top of the app and you can then choose to email those items to a friend or post them to your feed. What's really wild is that when you hover your mouse over a thumbnail of a video, it automatically starts playing. I wasn't expecting that - I figured you would have to go off site to watch videos, but it's all right there in Facebook.

On the main Search Share page, some interesting topics are already listed for you like Today's Hot Topics. For example, today's #1 topic is "polar bear status" (how sad!). There are also boxes showing Top Celebrities, Words of the Day, Your Friends' Latest Searches, and Your Saved Search History.

Search Share is somewhat similar to Zine, in that it facilitates you being able to share various items with friends, but unlike Zine, it's more of a tool that can be used as needed instead of an online digital magazine.

Live Search Spring Update Walk Through

Nic — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:14:00 GMT

I'm joined by Chris Rayner from the Live Search team as we walk through some of the new features in the latest spring update to Live Search. We check out xRank, News Search, Products, Live Search Health, HealthVault and Rick Astley... naturally.

Live Search is at www.live.com.

Customizing Vista's Search

sarahintampa — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:49:00 GMT

Remember how I told you that you could add Wikipedia to your choices in Windows Vista's default search? Well, there are other ones you can add, too, like these:

Live Search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%+

IMDB: http://search.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%+

Dictionary Search: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=%+

Now what I need to know is how I can use all of them - the gpedit.msc section (see earlier instructions on this) only lets you pick one. I want them all! Any ideas?

Live.com - Your FriendFeed Search Engine

sarahintampa — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:59:00 GMT

Being somewhat of a FriendFeed addict myself, this story on SEO and Tech Daily caught my eye: "Live.com Heavily Indexing FriendFeed." If you haven't already heard about FriendFeed (where have you been?), it's the hot new lifestreaming aggregation service that lets you keep tabs on all of your friends' activities on the social web. In one continuous stream of information, you can see when they post to their post, share a video on YouTube, add a picture to flickr, Digg a story, and much more from an ever-growing list of services. What's great about FriendFeed is that all your friends don't have to be on the service for you to enjoy using it - you have the ability to create "imaginary" friends if you know your friend's username on the service(s) you want to follow.

So, back to the blog post. What blogger Charlie Anzman noticed was that an ego-search (when you search for yourself on a search engine) on Live.com returned FriendFeed results for both the #1 and #2 spots. No one else seems to be doing that yet. I think this is great since finding someone on FriendFeed will quickly get you to their social network profiles where you can find out more about them. Of course, if that person if well known enough to have a Wikipedia page or something more official, those results would get ranked higher, but FriendFeed still has a strong showing.

It looks like I'll be people searching on Live.com from now on!

Search Wikipedia from Vista's Start Menu

sarahintampa — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:48:00 GMT

If you're a fan of Wikipedia, you're going to love this Windows Vista hack I found on ITworld.com. You can add a "Search Wikipedia" option from the Vista's Instant Search box that's on your Windows start menu. It's really not that hard, if you are familiar with using the Local Policy editor. Here are the steps:

Press Windows Key + R and type in gpedit.msc, click "OK"
Open the User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Instant Search\Custom Instant Search Internet Search provider policy setting.
Enable the policy setting, type Search Wikipedia in the first textbox and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%w in the second textbox, and click OK.
Open a command prompt and type gpupdate/force to immediately apply the new policy setting.

After you do that, you'll see 3 search options: in addition to "Search Everywhere" and "Search the Internet", you'll now see "Search Wikipdedia," too! How cool is that?

This probably works for all languages, if you substitute "en" with your country's code.

News Search Adds RSS

sarahintampa — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:43:00 GMT

Here's some great news from the Windows Live Search team: Earlier this month, we told you when the new web service News Search was launched. The site, which offers many great features like local news and top videos was only missing one thing as far as its users were concerned: RSS feeds. Well, no more! A blog posting on the Live Search blog states, "you wanted it, and now you have it." That's right, RSS feed are now available in News Search for all the categories or for the specific searches you perform. Thanks guys!

New Tafiti Site

sarahintampa — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:17:00 GMT

Tafiti, the experimental search engine based on Silverlight, was updated recently and now offers more Windows Live Services integration. The update includes the use of presence and P2P messenger APIs that allow you to now share your search favorites with your IM buddies. To see this new feature in action, you'll need to sign into Tafiti with your Windows Live ID. If you're already signed into Messenger on your PC, you'll be signed out there and then signed into Messenger on tafiti.mslivelabs.com. Check it out for yourself - the new site is available here: http://tafiti.mslivelabs.com/Default.aspx.

How To Search Your PSTs with Vista's Built-In Search

sarahintampa — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 15:32:00 GMT

Do you archive your email to PST files (maybe due to a corporate policy limiting your mailbox size)? If so, you know that even though it's archived, you will still need to access those old emails from time to time. If you don't want to keep all your archives open in your Outlook, there is another way...if you use Windows Vista. With Vista's built-in search option, you can specify that you want PSTs to be indexed (this is not turned on by default). It's pretty easy to set this up, just follow these steps:

Go to the Control Panel
Choose "Indexing Options"
Click on the "Advanced" button
Click on the "File Types" tab
Check the checkbox next to "PST" to include it in the search
Select the bullet next to the option "Index Properties and File Contents"
Click OK and OK again on the message that appears.

You're done! Now you can use Vista's built-in search to find that email you need!

3 New Search Projects from Microsoft Research

sarahintampa — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:46:00 GMT

At TechFest, Microsoft Research unveiled three new search projects aimed to enhance your search experience. Here are the details:
SearchTogether: SearchTogether is an IE plugin for social search. It lets you and your friends search together via an IE sidebar. The plugin, which will be available in Spring 2008 features page rating, split searching, shared summaries, chat, and more.
CoSearch: CoSearch lets users who are using the same computer at the same time search together by using multiple mice or cell phones. Yes, cell phones! A person using a phone could move the cursor on the screen and transfer data to the phone.
Searchbar: Searchbar is an IE sidebar that lets you save your searches, organize them, and add notes about them.

I can't wait to check these out! Watch for TechFest interviews by Tina Wood coming this week.

Virtual Earth

lorigros — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:32:00 GMT

Ich habe mit Johannes Kebeck, Virtual Earth Technologie Spezialist, gesprochen und er hat mir viel über Virtual Earth erklärt und gezeigt. Virtual Earth ist Microsofts Plattform für Mapping-Applikationen und Local-Search. Mit Virtual Earth kann man digitale interaktive Karten mit verschiedenen Ansichten im Internet oder Intranet Applikationen einbauen, Geschäftsprozesse mit Geodaten umsetzen oder verwalten oder ganz einfach Daten auf einer Karte visuell abbilden.

Am coolsten mit der interaktiven Karte ist die Bird’s Eye View, wo man die Erde aus der Perspektive eines Vogels sehen kann. Deutschland aus der Bird’s Eye View Perspektive, könnt Ihr auch sehen unter…
http://maps.live.com

Da kann man auch die Welt in 3D erleben.

Johannes hat mir auch den einfachsten Weg gezeigt, Virtual Earth zu benutzen. Mit Popfly kann man Mashups mit Virtual Earth bauen und einfach in Blogs, Live Spaces, Webseiten, etc. integrieren.

Wenn Ihr tiefer mit Virtual Earth arbeiten wollt, dann lohnt es sich auf der Virtual Earth Interactive SDK Webseite anzuschauen. Da kann man lernen und herausfinden was alles mit Virtual Earth möglich ist. Die Webseite findet Ihr hier…
http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/

Cellphone Supercomputer

sarahintampa — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 08:10:00 GMT

A new technology from Accenture's research labs, a French company, allows cell phones to transform into thin clients. The technology was demoed last week by showing a cell phone that recorded images of a print of Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" painting. After the camera took video images of the painting, a search of a database on the linked Windows XP computer returned results giving information about the painting as well as info about the the recent film of the same title. This extends the possibility of mobile-based search to include interaction with objects in the real world...when can I get a phone that does that? (via The Raw Feed)

Live Search for Windows Mobile

sarahintampa — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:17:00 GMT

A must-have for Windows Mobile users is the Live Search app for mobile devices. If you need to search for a place, get directions, or find what else is in the area, Live Search for Windows Mobile can really be a lifesaver. After installation, to use Live Search, you just click on the Live Search icon from the device's Start Menu, and the application launches. From the main screen, you can easily navigate to select the city of your choice by drilling down by geographic region and alphabetical listings. To find a business or category, you enter in the information you need to find in the search box and your results will display on a map. You can use the routing feature to get directions from point A to point B, and, in major cities, you can even see what traffic is like on your selected route. Roadblocks and delays get highlighted in red, letting you know if you need to plan an earlier departure to reach your destination in time.

Using a compatible Bluetooth GPS receiver, you can view your location on the map in real-time. If you're in a particular area and are looking for things to do, you can use the Live Search tool to find nearby restaurants, shopping & services, transportation, nightlife, and more. After choosing a particular selection from this menu, you can zoom in, get directions, save to your contacts, or SMS the location to a friend. To get the application, download Live Search from http://ls.windowsmobile.com using your device's browser.

Microsoft HealthVault: Search, Store and Connect Health Information

bcrounse — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:45:00 GMT

As a physician, I know how important it is to have access to my patient's health information. As a patient, I know how frustrating it is to have my health information scattered across multiple doctors, ambulatory clinics and hospitals. As a care manager for my elderly parents, I've experienced firsthand how difficult it is to keep track of their doctor appointments, medications, and medical problems.

Today, in Washington, D.C., Microsoft is announcing a new tool that will begin to bring order to this chaos. It's called HealthVault; an environment of new online services to help people SEARCH, STORE and CONNECT their health information, putting them in control of their, and their family’s health and wellness.

HealthVault, designed with security and privacy in mind, is built on the principle that people should have a copy of their own health information, have control over it, and be able to share their information with whomever they choose. I think many people are going to proclaim, "It's about time!".

Using HealthVault, people will be able to store and control an array of health information, including prescription medication lists, health histories, hospital discharge summaries, lab results, fitness data and search results.

In addition to being a place to securely store and share personal health information, people can also use HealthVault to access and put to practical use a variety of new health services and home health medical devices.

Microsoft HealthVault Connection Center will make it possible for people to upload health-related data, such as that taken from blood-pressure cuffs, heart rate monitors, blood glucose monitors and peak flow meters. The technology is straightforward and makes it easy to confidently share health information with family, caregivers or physicians. With the support of partners that will develop these services and devices, Microsoft has committed to a platform that is free to consumers, inclusive of industry standards and trusted through robust privacy and security safeguards.

Speaking of privacy and security, I know that nothing is more important when it comes to your personal health information. The HealthVault platform is underpinned by the following clear, strong health privacy commitments:

The Microsoft HealthVault record you create is controlled by you.
You decide what goes into your HealthVault record.
You decide who can see and use your information on a case by case basis.
Microsoft does not use your health information for commercial purposes unless you are asked and you clearly tell Microsoft they may.

Rest assured, we know that transforming healthcare is an incredibly complex challenge – one which no single organization can solve alone. It will require the participation of leaders in every sector of the healthcare ecosystem if success is to be achieved. However, with Microsoft's broad customer reach, extensive software platform and broad partner community, we believe that we have the depth and breadth required to help transform the way people and providers connect with health information and services.

You can learn more about today's launch of HealthVault by clicking on this video clip with Microsoft Health Solutions Group Corporate VP, Peter Neupert and Dr. Deborah Peel, founder of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation.

I'm pleased to announce that more than 40 other innovative organizations – from leading medical providers, health management device manufacturers, and national health agencies are embarking with us on this challenge to bring the health industry into the Internet age. We invite the rest of the health industry to join us.

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

Lançado o Novo Windows Live Seacrh

Galileu — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:45:00 GMT

Hoje foi lançada uma nova versão da ferramenta de busca da Microsoft, o Windows Live Search. Essa nova versão conta com uma quantidade maior de páginas indexadas e um desempeno mais rápido na busca. A interface foi atualizada para facilitar o uso das diversas funcionalidades da ferramenta. O banco de imagens brasileiras foi ampliado e um tradutor de inglês-português foi incorporado também. Confira a nova ferramenta no site http://search.live.com.

Full Text PDF Search Tool

sarahintampa — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:03:00 GMT

The Foxit PDF IFilter is "designed to help users to index a large amount of PDF documents & then quickly find text within these documents." Whether files, email attachments or database records, Foxit PDF IFilter helps you find the text you are looking for. The tools supports the following Microsoft products: Windows Indexing Service, MSN Desktop Search, Internet Information Server, SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), Site Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server and all other products based on Microsoft Search technology. If you download this to use with Vista's built-in search, you will need to rebuild the search index. To do this, open the Indexing Options dialog box from Control Panel, click the Advanced button, and then click "Rebuild." Thanks to Ed Bott's blog for this great tip!

Making the most out of Live Search

Laura — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:39:00 GMT

A search engine can be your best friend or your biggest frustration. There are many out there to choose from so it's also important to choose wisely. Windows Live Search has made some huge advancements recently that will really enhance your user experience- and that's going to make all the difference. Take a look and find out what's in your future for search.

Medstory debuts on MSN Health and Fitness

bcrounse — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:23:00 GMT

Back in April I posted information on HealthBlog about Medstory, the medical search company that had recently been acquired by Microsoft. I interviewed Medstory founder and CEO, Dr. Alain Rappaport, who I have known for nearly a decade. Alain and I first met while I was co-founding a venture-backed technology company aimed at facilitating physician-patient communication and collaboration. Little did we know at the time that many years later our paths would cross once again under Microsoft's umbrella.

Dr. Rappaport called me last week to say that Medstory is now fully integrated with MSN’s Health and Fitness site. He wanted me to be among the first to know and invited me to take it for a test drive.

After navigating to MSN Health and Fitness, I initiated a search on Prostate Cancer. Right away, I noticed that my search yielded Medstory's unique and rather colorful “dashboard".

The dashboard is made up of categories. Under each category is a list of related health topics that are most pertinent to the search being performed. The color bar next to each topic illustrates its degree of relevance to the subject of the search. For instance, one of the categories for a search on Prostate Cancer is Tests and Procedures. The most relevant topic in that category is the PSA Test. When I click on PSA Test, I have the option of refining my search to include both Prostate Cancer and PSA Test, or PSA Test alone.

Should I decide to search for both terms, the most pertinent articles containing both terms will be revealed. I'm given similar choices each time I conduct a search adding a third, fourth, or fifth term to my list. I also have the option of jumping to articles that are associated only with the new term I'm selecting from the dashboard. I also have the choice of using a "Site Search Results" tab that only reveals articles on MSN, or "Health-Related Web Results" that will return health information from all across the worldwide web. Note that the categories include Complementary Therapies and Nutrition; two that will be especially popular with consumers.

Prior to founding Medstory, Dr. Rappaport had had an illustrious career in artificial intelligence research and data mining. He says he turned his attention to improving how consumers and clinicians find and use medical information because healthcare is an industry that is driven by information. It is not enough, he says, to provide links to information. Search engines must become intelligent enough to understand a user’s intent. “We need a web that knows versus one that just links”, said Dr. Rappaport. “We are moving the center of gravity of search to return an understanding of what the user wants. Our core objective is to provide meaningful information that is also actionable.”

Dr. Rappaport said he teamed up with Microsoft because of the opportunity to engage with customers and partners all around the world who are now coming forward to help us innovate and use this technology. “Even in parts of the world where populations are medically underserved", he said, "providing relevant and timely information, will make a difference”.

Of course, this is just the beginning of many health related applications and services for both consumers and medical professionals that you'll be seeing from Microsoft and our partners in the months and years ahead. But for now, the next time you are seeking information about health or wellness, navigate over to MSN Health and Fitness and take Medstory for a spin. I think you will like what you see.

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft could acquire Yahoo: What do you think?

Jesse — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:41:00 GMT

If you ever wanted to see a perfect storm of hyperlinked news, today’s revelation that Microsoft wants to talk to Yahoo about a merger is it. For those who haven’t already been deafened by twitter exclamations and email flurries, let’s walk through the news thus far. That bastion of responsible news reporting The New York Post, broke the story this morning. Apparently when Google picked up DoubleClick last month, the big heads here in Redmond decided it may be time to ante up in the acquisition game, and reopened a longstanding dialog with Yahoo. The ever-anonymous ‘sources’ were sure to include a $50b price tag, as well as reminding us that combining the search advertising shares of MSFT and YHOO would represent 27 percent against GOOG’s 65 percent.

David Kaplan of paidContent.org chimed in early, echoing the NY Post article, as well as reminding everyone of Jerry Yang’s avoidance of Microsoft products, and how much an acquisition could close the gap between Microsoft and Google. Reuters also covered the story with this choice quote from Peter Lobravico of Wall Street Access: “You can’t find a stronger buyer than Microsoft and while it would spur a lot of political and regulatory noise, everyone knows in the end that the deal would go through.”

Scott Beale picked the right graphic for Laughing Squid’s coverage, and also highlighted the 18 point jump in Yahoo’s stock on news of the negotiations. He also pointed out Eric Schonfeld’s post at The Next Net, which notes that the deal would have an air of desperation, and that, “The culture-clash of two companies could undermine any financial gains a Microsoft-Yahoo merger could produce.” Some astute opinion came from Henry Blodget at Internet Outisder, who recommends the two companies join, and then for Microsoft to spin off a Yahoo-MSN organization.

This questions raised by this morning’s news are far more interesting than the coverage of it, given that very little has actually transpired. So what are the questions then? What are your wildest fantasies about how a Microhoo/Yahsoft would exist, and what sort of combinations could make the new company insanely great?