We are excited to announce the first beta release of the Windows Live Product Search service (
http://products.live.com). The product is a result of a lot of hard work over the last several months by the product teams in Redmond and Beijing in collaboration with Microsoft Research Asia. This blog is a conduit between the product team and our user community. We are interested in hearing your feedback on the product and improving the quality of the beta offering.
We wanted to create a Windows Live service, which enables users to search for products online from a wide variety of online sellers. We listened to the feedback from search users who were not completely satisified with the Windows Live web search experience when it came to answering commercial queries.
At beta, the index will contain products from over 100,000 sellers and this number will continue to grow over time. The project started with the premise of enabling small businesses to be well represented in the index and to enable users to find hard-to-find and unique items. Working with Microsoft Research enabled us to productize the core technology which can algorithmically classify and extract product information from numerous online web sites. It is interesting to note that in addition to indexing products such as toaster ovens and chai tea, the system also indexes commercial offers for vacation rentals to automobiles.
The product results shown in the left pane are ordered by the relevance of the results to the search query. Microsoft does not charge for any traffic generated from click-through on those results to the seller. Only the ads pane on the right-hand side of the window is monetized.
The user interface stays true to the simplicity of the search paradigm and inherits many features common to the Windows Live search family such as smart scroll, image hovering, and level of detail slider. In addition, users are able to refine their searches by related term, brand, seller and price.
Hope you enjoy shopping using our beta service!
Imran Aziz, Lead Program Manager
On behalf of the Live Product Search team.
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