Windows Live Running Test Site For Spaces Search
Found this website, testmash.com, which the Windows Live folks are using for mockups of future web pages and features. It looks like they were/are working on a very nice search engine for Windows Live Spaces, as well as some popularity features. I’ve found five pages there so far, and here they are (click to enlarge):
The most interesting one is this one, testmash.com/experts.aspx?q=photography, which shows a new Spaces tab in the Windows Live search engine, and features experts in the sidebar that you can send instant messages about the subject you are searching about. It appears that Microsoft is interested in rating experts in certain topics, probably both through their Spaces blog and QnA actions, rating them and placing them in some search results, so that if you want more info on a topic, you can IM the expert instead of wading through search results. Hopefully, Microsoft would pay these experts, or the experts would have means of making something for their service.
This next one is an advanced search page. Since you are searching Windows Live Spaces, there are a lot of options, and the advanced search page is more advanced than any I’ve seen. You can search in zones (all of Spaces, home pages, for people, blog entries, photos and lists) and by degrees away from you (all Spaces, just your friends, both, or select friends), searching by display name, first and/or last name, age range, gender, occupation, keyword, interests, location (including by people with 5-15 miles of a location) and date. In the search results, your friends are listed first, followed by all the rest of Spaces.
The next one is a page of popular Spaces, popular people and popular blog entries.
The next one is a page of interests. It appears to let you choose up to six interests, pick a location, and see on a single page a bunch of people who have each of those interests in your area.
Finally, there’s a page of the top 20 videos, all of them from MSN Video (but presumably a final version would use Soapbox.
There’s also a front page mostly with the same content and layout as the current one, just with links to the new pages.
The site is officially owned by Rob Dolin of the Spaces team.
Interesting stuff. If anyone can find more pages, or find out more info why this was created, let me know.
[…] Nathan Weinberg discovered a interesting website that appears to be showing of enhanced and extended search capabilities for search Windows Live Spaces. […]
Pingback by Enhanced Search for Windows Live Spaces? at MSTechToday | February 7, 2007
[…] read the rest Bookmark to: Tags: Microsoft, windos live « Microsoft Singapore BI Day Singapore | […]
Pingback by Windows Live Running Test Site For Spaces Search » Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 resources | February 7, 2007
[…] Nathan Weinberg discovered a interesting website that appears to be showing of enhanced and extended search capabilities for search Windows Live Spaces. […]
Pingback by Enhanced Search for Windows Live Spaces? » D’ Technology Weblog — Technology, Blogging, Gadgets, Fashion, Life Style. | February 7, 2007
[…] Sounds great to me. If the APIs are really as powerful as it seems, and you can build something like TestMash, then I really hope someone does it. What I really hope, though, is that attention paid to what Rob’s done at TestMash makes its way into a real, advanced search engine for Windows Live Spaces. Right now, Spaces doesn’t have much of a search engine, which doesn’t jibe with what the rest of Windows Live has, and doesn’t even match the awful offerings from MySpace. […]
Pingback by » TestMash.com Explained » InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel | February 8, 2007
In spanish or other languagues?
Comment by mmadrigal | February 8, 2007
[…] Windows Live Search snippets Here’s a few things relating to Search that caught our eye this week: SearchEngineLand has a detailed interview with Live Search’s Justin Osmer. While there’s only so many ways you can put a positive spin on poor share performance, Justin does pretty well.SEL: OK, to paraphrase that: Right now you’re offering “just as good as” search experience and really the next stage is to look at differentiating yourself from the competition?Justin: Absolutely. We’ve nailed the fundamentals. We feel pretty confident, at this point, that we’ve done that. Now what we need to do is innovate on top of that, add those differentiators, and make our experience stands out and be unique from the competition. That’s where our focus is now. It just took us two or three years to get to where we are now, which if you look at search history is relatively impressive. Building our own algorithmic engine, building our own ad platform, getting all this stuff up, we’ve made some tweaks to it over time. But now we feel that we’re in a very good place for the side-by-side comparison. Now what we need to do is take it to that next level.Read more Nathan Weinberg describes some new spaces mashups going on around search. What was great to see was Rob Dolin jumping in and explaining the situation, as well as asking for user feedback. Take a look at his site www.testmash.com and give him your thoughts on how it compares to the existing Spaces search. The Live Search SOAP API has been updated, with again another call for user feedback, this time from non ASP/Java developers. Published Sunday, February 11, 2007 3:29 PM by Chris Filed under: Windows Live, Spaces, Developer, Search […]
Pingback by LiveSide - News blog : Windows Live Search snippets | February 11, 2007