The team just released changes to the live site that boost customer-perceived relevance by increasing the number of query results with images.  The table below summarizes the improvement.  Why aren’t there 100% images in the top results?  The reason is largely because many sites, including very reputable merchants like Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, and AceHardwareSuperStore.com, block image crawling bots or seriously throttle them.  We will have to work with these sites to address these issues, but the latest improvements in the number of Product Search top results with images are already quite significant.

• Percent of Top Results with Images (Before): 79.2%
• Percent of Top Results with Images (After): 88.6%
• Improvement: +9.4%

A before (top) and after (bottom) comparison is pictured below.  Note that not all results are as relevant and image packed as highlighted at right but this is a good example.

This update, in addition to continued improvements in our selection from both crawl and the Product Upload Beta, is one example of how we are improving Product Search relevance.  This begs the question: how do you measure relevance?

For Product Search, we look at a number of factors including the following.

• Is the product what the user was looking for given the query?  To a computer program, this is not always obvious.  Consider the query “speaker”.  This result is probably not what the user was looking for even though the search engine may think so because it contains an exact match on the query keyword.

• Is there a product image?  Given two similar results where one has an image and the other does not, we find that users often prefer the result with an image.  This is where our latest change helps improve relevance.
• Is the merchant reputable?  Given several results for similar products, users would probably prefer a result from a well-known merchant such as Amazon.com over a result from a small online shop that they’re never purchased from before.

The Live Search team has been working hard to improve the Product Search Beta and Product Upload Beta sites based on the customer and merchant feedback that we have collected over the past few months.  Here are the changes that we have just released.

Product Search Beta Changes

Check out the improved experience by visiting the Product Search Beta site.  Note that if you go to Product Search via the “More” links in web search results, you may not see these improvements for a few days as the changes are being rolled out incrementally to all Live Search users over the next two weeks.

• Major performance improvements: We’ve improved the speed of the site by decreasing page load time for Product Search results significantly.  Pages load several seconds faster on average.  Keep in mind that this is based on testing in Redmond and that actual page load times may vary depending on where you live.

• UI improvements: We have improved UI usability based on customer feedback and usage statistics.  Refinements are now drop down menus that load quickly, the number of results on each page is customizable based on user preference, and sample searches have been added to the home page to help new users get started with the site.  We’ve also made feedback links more prominent on the site so that we can collect even more user feedback.

• Bug fixes: The team has fixed several bugs especially around state management.  This means that unexpected site behavior has been corrected in cases where users click the back button, undo refinements, or navigate back and forth between different product search results.

Here’s a screenshot of the new refinements UI:

Product Upload Beta Changes

We had an incredible response from merchants since the program launched back in November 2006 and have now published more than 5 million offers from merchants into Live Product Search Beta!  We have collected feedback from merchants and updated the Product Upload Beta site with the following changes.

• Google Base Feed Support: Merchants can now upload feeds using the Google Base feed format
• RSS: Merchants can subscribe to an RSS feed to receive regular updates on the status of their uploaded catalogs
• Improved Bulk Upload: We’ve made numerous improvements to make the FTP bulk upload process faster and enabled secure FTP
• UI Improvements: We’ve updated the user experience with usability improvements based on merchant feedback including a new home page and upload page.

Please take some time to give us additional feedback on the sites and keep the feature suggestions coming!!

Ling Bao, Phanindra Kanumuri, and Jonathan Hsu, Product Search team et. all.
Live Search team

Live Product Search is designed to surface the widest selection of available products on the web.  To date, the site has featured products that we’ve identified through crawling the web and extracting product attributes (image, description, price, etc.).  Of course, that’s not the only way to get product data.  

Today, we are pleased to announce Product Upload, a free service for merchants interested in making their product catalog available in Live Product Search.  Though a full-scale rollout of the service will happen in early 2007, we are accepting applications for a limited beta program here.  

After signing up, selected beta participants will receive an invitation code and instructions on how to upload your catalog.  We’ll be selecting beta participants based on a need to get a diverse variety of merchants and product types.  If you’re not selected as a beta participant, we’ll certainly let you know when the program expands.

Here is a quick glance of functionality accessible through this service:

• Catalog Management

Upload you product catalog in any of the formats support, i.e. text or XML through either HTTP upload or FTP. Products can include images, description, price, and links to web addresses on your site.  You can upload any number of catalogs with no specific limits. Once your catalog is successfully published and has passed the validation steps it will be searchable through Live Product Search.

• Easy Signup

You will need a Live ID (formerly Passport) to login and signup.  Fill out a simple application that describes your business and optionally fill out more business details.

• Reporting

Keep up to date on the status of your catalogs and keep track of your products on Live Product Search.

We’re continuing to innovate with Live Product Search and look forward to showing you more innovations soon.  In fact, check back next week for some additional new features.

• For assistance with using Product Upload Beta, e.g., creating accounts, catalogs, and uploading your files, see Product Upload Beta Help.
• For questions or concerns not addressed by Product Upload Beta Help, contact Product Upload Beta Support.
• For providing feedback and making suggestions on this Service,See Product Upload Feedback

Phanindra Kanumuri
Program Manager
Live Product Search team

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