It's all mobile: Search

Live Search for mobile Launches at 3GSM

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:23:48 GMT

The Live Search for mobile team has been hard at work since our beta release in November. You can now download the newest version at: http://wls.live.com (from your phone). Hopefully you'll like the new features in the Windows Mobile version and the polish we added to the J2ME version. Be sure to let us know what you think, or if you have any suggestions. If you need a reason to search, think about what day it is tomorrow, and hopefully things work out for you as well as the do for our friend Jim :)

Searching for Love? Or Just Love to Search?

On the bus home from work, Jim realizes it’s Valentine’s Day and he hasn’t prepared any dinner plans with his wife Katie! Instead of panicking, he pulls out his Windows Mobile device and opens Live Search for mobile.

He navigates the Categories list to Restaurants, then Ethnic Restaurants until he finds Italian Restaurants, Katie’s favorite food.

He scrolls through the results until he recognizes a place his buddy Frank recommended to him last week. Bringing up the details, he clicks one more time to call the restaurant and make reservations.

Just to be sure, he gets step-by-step driving directions to the place, and checks the traffic. By the time he gets home, he’s ready to surprise Katie with his plans for a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner!

If you’re looking for a romantic restaurant like Jim, or need to find the nearest florist on the go, download Live Search for mobile at http://wls.live.com (from your phone) and find the way to a loved one’s heart.

Version 1.0 Released

At the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, we announced the official release of our client application for Windows Mobile devices as well as compatible J2ME capable devices in the US and UK. You might have heard about the beta release back in November, but we’ve added some new features in addition to the great things you can already do.

·         Category-based local searching -Search businesses and restaurants through our category system and save your thumbs from typing.
·         Maps and Directions - Get maps of your area and directions to your destination. Hook up a GPS* unit to search around and track your current position.
·         Traffic - View real-time traffic in selected US cities to save time and help plan your routes.
·         New! Contacts list integration* – search for a contact’s address without typing it or save a business to your contacts to use again later.
·         New! SMS a friend* - Send a text message with business’ address and phone number to your friends so they know where to meet you.

If you don’t have a compatible phone, try typing mobile.live.com/search into your phone’s browser. For those without data plans, you can always send a text message to 95483 (WLIVE) with your search query.

Download at: http://wls.live.com (from your phone)

Learn more about Live Search for mobile.

Send us your feedback at: lsmobile@microsoft.com.

-Darwin and the Mobile Search team

*Feature currently only available on Windows Mobile version.

Search on the Go with Live Search for Mobile Beta- Download Now

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:32:32 GMT

Looking for a killer Windows Mobile application that can make your phone both fun and useful? Check out the Windows Live Search for mobile downloadable application. This is available in the US only at this time.

It's a Mobile rich client – Download an application to your phone for local search, maps, driving directions, and live traffic information in a faster, richer and more interactive user interface. It's the best way to search from your phone.

Mobile Browsing - Access maps and directions directly from your phone’s browser. Simply enter mobile.live.com/search into your phone’s address bar and select Map. Choose from the likes of Local, Web, Map, News and Spaces and get Live Search on your mobile device.

Text Messages (SMS) - If you don’t have a data plan, you can simply send a text message to 95483 (WLIVE) with a query like “Toys Chicago, IL” or “Coffee 90210” and you’ll immediately receive a text message reply with the nearest business listings with address and phone numbers.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this beta so we can continue to improve. Just send them over to wlsmbeta@microsoft.com and, check out mobile.search.live.com for more information.

- Darwin and the Windows Live for mobile Search Team

Got mobile? Searching on your mobile just got easier

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 20:47:48 GMT

Windows Live SMS Search Beta for mobile.

I love this. It’s so simple. I am not a brainiac but now I can act like one. J By getting instant answers to whatever gets thrown my way and by finding my way around town. When I am on the go and can’t remember the phone number or address of my favorite nail salon, coffee shop, or the restaurant that I want to go to. All I do is whip out my phone send a text message to 95483 (WLIVE) and plug in ‘salon rae seattle wa’ and I get the phone number and address. I can call and see if they can squeeze me for a quick fill. J

Here’s the best part. I can save this to my phone so I don’t have to look it up again and this is much more cost effective and easier (and ok safer as I am always doing this in my car) than dialing for information on my phone and being transferred to the business. In the past, if their line was busy, then I was out of luck. Now I just feel really in control of the info I want and need.

It’s so simple…You can do this. Give it a try. It’s in a Beta right now and available for a test drive to subscribers of Cingular, Verizon, Sprint Nextel and Alltel in the US only. Watch this space for details as to when it’s coming to your market!

Here’s how it works and a sneak peek at what fun you can have with this service

Easy to follow instructions

1. Send a SMS to 95483 (WLIVE) on your phone

2. To find a local business - Type in ‘salon rae seattle wa”

3. For instant Answers - Start all your queries with a ? question mark (?), like ? mothers day

So here’s the full list of what you can find out with this service and become even smarter too……

ü Local Search Queries

· Local Business & Residential Listing ( e.g. Starbucks and your zip code)

· Reverse Phone Number Lookup (‘4258828080’)

ü Instant Answer Queries (Remember to start your queries with ‘?’unless specified otherwise)

· Stock Quotes (U.S. & Int’l Exchanges)

· Area & Country Telephone Codes

· Word Definitions – use ‘D’ instead of ‘?’

· Holiday Dates

· Math (Calculations, Unit Conversions & Equation Solutions- ‘? 15% of 32.99’ or ‘? Cups in liter’ or ‘? 2y^2+5y+10=40’

· Health & General Information (e.g. ‘? Calories in Martini’ OR ‘? Tokyo Population’)

ü Auto Spell-check and Correction

ü Improved Formatting of Result Messages

We'd love to hear your feedback on this service! The mobile search team launched a new site last week- go check it out and you might learn something. Go to http://mobile.search.live.com/about

Search updates

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 01:37:08 GMT

Here are some sample screenshots of the new interface. Release is imminent so you'll be able to try it yourself real soon.

Follow this link from the home page to enter the updated search experience.

Having used this new search service over the last several months as we worked on this update, I think you'll like it a lot :) If you've been using one of our competitors recently, now is the time to switch!

Some of the major improvements are: a newly redesigned interface, one-click 'all search', brand new news and map searches, and a brand new mobile rendering experience to read the news stories and web pages that you find (details in separate post).

The newly redesigned interface uses softer blue and black colors - dark black and stark blue are so last year, the spiffy new logos look great and we've optimized it for the things you do a lot. You'll always know where you are because we've made sure that the top of each page always shows you where you are. We've even thought about how the site looks in your browser history, you'll be able to jump to exactly which page you want.

See the word 'All' ? Gone is the requirement to always choose what type of information to search for. Now you can just search All available information types at once! If you want to search a specific type, just choose it instead of All. We've optimized search to always use your last location yet made it simple to choose a different location. If you feel more comfortable seeing the location and doing a local search, you will enjoy the Windows Live Local page (detailed post coming soon).

Tip: You can use the numbers on your phone keypad to activate links at the bottom of the page, we call them menu items. These will jump to other pages or to specific places within the page you are on. Just look for the key to use in []. In this screenshot you can use [4] to jump over to the Windows Live Local home page. On all pages [0] will return Home, [*] and [#] will jump to the top and bottom of the page.

Now that this project's just about done, I'm ready to go on a vacation without my cats. Looks like there are a couple sitters near by, a national association of professional pet sitters and Ms. Sherry Bolte has just reached an important milestone in her life, and taghome1193 might have some info on his space.

Notice the search details at the top of the page. The refine link is an easy way to change up the search. There are a couple of results from all the information sources and a more link to get to the rest from that source. Hopefully most of the time you'll find what you're looking for right here, if not hit more. News stories are new in this release! The time since the article was published and the source help choose the stories to read. There aren't any cities or landmarks called pet sitters but when if there were you'd see them in the map section.

Near: sometimes you want to use one of your last 5 locations, sometimes you want to type a new one in - both are available.

Tip: the [1] next to the information type is a shortcut key too, just press it to zoom to the type of information you want to look at.

Hope you try it and like it. Tell me what you think, we're always improving it and your ideas will shape the future.

Windows Live Search for Mobile Launches!

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 17:05:15 GMT

We just launched a beta of Windows Live Search for mobile devices. This beta is available for WAP 2.0 and HTML capable phones. You can access it from the mobile home deck (navigate to mobile.msn.com on your phone) or by entering the following URL directly: http://mobile.msn.com/search

This beta includes a brand new web search feature. This makes it easy to get details on a breaking news story, to answer bar trivia without needing to whip out your laptop; it helps you quickly find and read information you want without typing full URLs using your phone keypad. Hopefully you’ll add this as a favorite on your mobile phone and use it every day. Here’s a summary of what’s available:

Web search uses the latest algorithmic search from MSN Search and presents the results in a mobile friendly way so you see as many results as possible on each screen.

There are two viewing options for the results: adaptive mobile rendering and the original page. If we detect that your phone supports HTML we link you directly to the original page. On WAP 2.0 browsers, we link you to the adaptive mobile rendered version. If you want to see the other version of the site, say to check this out on your desktop browser right now, you can click the Mobile or Original link provided in the search result.

Our Windows Live adaptive mobile rendering is a brand new web viewing option for mobile phones. It is novel in that it uses a table of contents collapsed view. I hope you like it. It is designed to provide a balance between short download times and making it easy to find the elements of the page that you are looking for. We automatically group related content on the page into what we call panels. All panels are ranked using the query terms you provided and relevant panels are notated with a red star. The highest ranking panel is chosen as the default open panel. The page is then presented as a table of contents of the panels, plus one open panel. We provide a Jump to Content link at the top of the page and hook it up to the 2 key on your phone pad to jump directly to the open panel; in fact most browsers jump there automatically. Clicking on a table of contents link opens that panel and closes the current panel. This makes it easier to navigate large pages which otherwise would be split across several pages without any way to know if the paragraph you are looking for is on the next page or not.

Large images are resized on our servers to fit the phone screen reducing data transfer size a great deal.

There is a really simple way to provide us feedback on how well the pages you view are rendered on your phone. Just click on the ‘Feedback: problem with page’ link and we will capture the description of your phone type (the UAString) and the page you are looking at (the URL). This provides us with a prioritized list of sites that you, our users, want us to focus our improvement efforts on.

There are some aspects of the HTML pages which this version of mobile adaptive rendering does not support. But we’ve gone the extra step to clearly explain this by showing static text in its place. For example we show [unsupported content] when we had to remove something like a flash animation that doesn’t currently have a mobile equivalent.

I hope you’ll enjoy our new web search with adaptive mobile rendering, and please leave comments if you have any feedback.

Timothy Sharpe

[Originally published on December 8, 2005]