Since my last post in May, we’ve been quietly toiling away at Windows Live Product Search.  There is still quite a bit of work ahead of us, but we’ve recently added a number of features and wanted to tell you about them.

To provide some context, Product Search provides a search experience custom-tuned for finding products available for sale on the web.  Our results provide rich information such as product pictures, pricing, and description.  We index these products by crawling the web and extracting rich meta-data from web pages.  As with core web search, it is free to be included in Product Search results.

Recent improvements to our (still in beta) Product Search include:

• Larger and fresher selection:  We have improved our crawl and extraction algorithms, resulting in both increased breadth of product offers and coverage per seller within our index.
• Higher quality of selection: We continue to work on increasing the number of quality sites selling products directly to consumers.  We have made some additional headway in reducing the amount of spam and affiliates sites within our index.  This is an important area of focus for the team and we hope to bring you more improvements in this area down the road.
• New grid-based default view: We received feedback from users about the number of items visible on the screen at one time.  After doing some usability testing we have decided to provide a grid view of results by default.  Doing so makes more items visible than the previous default of list view.  You can of course switch to the list view by moving the slide bar (next to the sort by filter) to the middle position.
• Enhanced preview: While the grid view allows you to see more products, enhanced preview allows you to see more information about each individual product.  See a larger image and description of the product by simply hovering the mouse pointer over a product picture. 
• Bug fixes and performance improvements:  We’ve made several bug fixes between May and August on the live site.  You may notice that the search results and images now load significantly faster than the initial beta.  Another change is that the refinements bar is now collapsible.
• Related terms refinement: The related terms feature is useful if you are trying to discover a broad product area, i.e. chai tea, tennis racquet, etc. and provides you with suggestions to further refine queries.  This feature uses a “tag cloud” display in which larger fonts indicate more popular search terms.  We continue to experiment on other ways to summarize and display interesting refinements for users.  The refinements bar is also now collapsible. 

You can reach our new and improved Product Search beta by visiting http://products.live.com or by clicking on the “Products” tab.

On behalf of the teams in Redmond and Beijing working to bring you this product, thanks for your continued interest.  We’re working hard to further improve the user experience and welcome your feedback.

Imran Aziz, Lead Program Manager
Live Product Search team

PS: Here are some of example searches

Chai Tea
XLR Adapter for Panasonic DVC30
Movie Poster
Bhindi Masala