From cashback to Live Search club we've been building programs to help increase engagement, usage, and loyalty. Today we're expanding our efforts with the release of SearchPerks!, a new program designed to reward consumers with cool prizes — like frequent flyer miles, Xbox games, and music downloads — just for using Live Search.

To participate, visit http://www.getsearchperks.com/ and download the Perk Counter, a small download that appears as a toolbar in Internet Explorer. The Perk Counter keeps count of your searches using Live Search and awards "tickets" that you can redeem for prizes at the end of the promotion. We award 500 bonus tickets just for downloading and installing the Perk Counter. You'll also earn an additional ticket for each of your queries on Live Search (up to 25 tickets per day).

You can accumulate tickets from the start of SearchPerks! today until the promotion ends on April 15, 2009. Registration will be open through the end of the calendar year.

Get started collecting SearchPerks! tickets for your searches on Live Search today!

Keith Jeffery, Senior Product Manager, Live Search

The Virtual Earth team has just released a major update that brings some great new features, as well as enhancements to existing features to Live Search Maps. Some of the highlights include:

• New imagery. Brings locations to life, with richer bird's eye and 3D imagery of more locations in cities across North America.

• Weather Integration. Features near-real time local weather and cloud formations within the 3D imagery.




• Localized maps. Provides maps in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish for customers in Western Europe. Localized maps are supported for both desktop and mobile applications.



• Near-matching capabilities. Uses near-matching capabilities to find locations with alternate and similar spellings, resulting in a more relevant search experience.


• Landmark-based routing. Enhances searching for customers in the U.S. and Canada by offering maps with familiar landmarks, such as gas stations and fast-food restaurants, called out by name.


• Rich imagery for mobile users. Shows new maps rendered specifically for mobile devices.

• One-click directions. Gives directions in one click, enabling you to choose from route options by shortest time, shortest distance, or traffic flow.

All of these improvements are made possible by the new Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2. If you are an application developer or a webmaster, you can take advantage of these new Virtual Earth offerings as well. For more details, see Announcing the Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2.

Enjoy!

Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist

If you were trying to get a hold of someone in Live Search today, you were probably getting nothing but voicemail as it seemed like everyone was keen to get downtown for the Microsoft company meeting! When I left campus this morning there were 10 buses full of Search team members leaving for Safeco field. After chatting briefly with Harry Shum and a few developers who were waiting for their bus, I headed out on my motorbike to get ready for my demo.

I’ve been here at the company for 17 years and I love the company meeting. When I worked in Dublin and London we used to watch the meeting on video link (a bit warmer), and when I moved to Seattle in 2003 I finally got to experience being there in person. It’s always been a great place to hear what’s happening across the company and check out all the cool demos. I had the opportunity to demo again this year, and although I can’t tell you all the cool things I got to show, I can say that it’s always fun demoing in front of a huge, enthusiastic stadium crowd. Backstage was amazing, watching the executives rehearsing and working together to make the event great for employees. Speaking for myself, I left with no doubt that our leaders love this company and the products we make and sell. Their passion was motivational for me.

One of the key themes for Live Search each year at the company meeting is to demonstrate how much feedback matters to us. We take all input seriously, as it is a great way for us to improve. Over the years, employee and customer feedback has helped us build out great vertical scenarios that simplify key tasks like shopping and travel. This feedback has also helped improve our core relevance to ensure we’re always focused on delivering the best results. This year's meeting was no exception, as we’re asking everyone to continue the tradition and to keep sending their feedback.

So even though you weren’t invited to our company meeting, we are extending you an invitation to give us your feedback about Live Search at live.com.

Derrick Connell, Group Program Manager

Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago, and Live Search has been hard at work collaborating with Powerset on several quick projects designed to be ready for testing within 30 days. These projects encouraged early collaboration between our two teams, as well as sharing of respective technologies.

Freebase Answers

Our first joint project was to expand the coverage of Live Search Answers. Today, many topical queries such as such as musicians, albums, and films don't show Answers. So for this experiment, we selected some of these categories and used Freebase to return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers in Powerset:

Our second project was to use Powerset's semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles. Because Wikipedia articles show up in a large percentage of Live Search queries, it's important that the captions are top notch.

Old caption

New caption

New related searches using the Factz engine

For our third project, we used Powerset's Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries:

For more details about these projects, including how Powerset is starting to incorporate Live Search technology into their site, see the Powerset blog.

All of these projects are currently being tested on a small, randomly selected audience, so watch out — you may see one! And stay tuned for more announcements from Powerset and Live Search.

Dr. Scott Prevost, General Manager, Powerset, and Dr. Hugh Williams, Primary Development Manager, Live Search

Now that the Web is more worldwide than ever, the number of non-native English speakers going online has ballooned, and yet online content in English still dominates. For these users, free translation services mean that an entire world of information can now actually be at their fingertips. We're doing something to help them out.

Translation now fully powered by the Microsoft Translator technology is available through Live Search, as well as IE8, the Windows Live Toolbar, and even a translation bot for Windows Live Messenger.

For example, to translate this search result, click "Translate this page" at the end of the result description:

You'll see the page in a bilingual view, with the original page on the left, and the translated page on the right.

Here's how the Messenger bot does translations for you. Just add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and start chatting away. You can have one-on-one conversations with the bot, or you can invite a friend and chat in different languages with the bot translating for you.

Here are the languages we support today:

• English to/from:
• Arabic
• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Russian (Russian to English only)
• Spanish
• Chinese Simplified to/from Chinese Traditional

We'll roll out more languages over the next several months.

To learn from Microsoft Research about how it works, check out Machine Translation. To keep up with new features, check out the Microsoft Translator team blog. And finally, to try out the service, go to Translator.

Or just click the Translate this page in your search results. However you use it, after you try it out let us know what you think!

Lane Rau, Marketing Manager, Microsoft Research Machine Translation team

Elections document the will of the people, or at least the will of registered voters. On November 4^th, you'll be asked to answer many questions, including who should be our next president, as well as questions at your state and local level.

Many blogs and analytical sites offer projections, comparisons to previous elections, and details about the issues and candidates themselves, including the MSN Election Guide. Those are great and important resources for informing your opinion.

But it's about the people's voice, right? And now you can search for what they're saying!

Live Search QnA represents the community's microphone and speaker, since the community asks and answers each other's questions. Links are encouraged to help prove or disprove a claim, and you can search through all the pre-existing question/answer threads over a range of topics. Michelle Slatalla, the New York Times journalist, reports on the rising phenomenon with her own recent experience in searching for (and finding) an answer to why her smoke alarms kept on beeping (answer: spider interference!).

And with the Democratic Convention finished and the Republican Convention underway, some of the most active political questions involve whether Senator Clinton's speech was sincere and supportive of Senator Obama, what people think of Senator McCain's Vice-Presidential pick, and whether the economy or national defense will be the driving factor. Whether you agree or disagree, join the community and express your opinion.

Let the community hear who you think is going to win and why!

Liam Ross, Senior Product Manager, Live Search

Whew, what a busy couple of weeks it's been. We launched our new home page back at the end of July with the goal of using a new picture each week. Then we decided to get a little crazy for the Olympics and rotate the images twice a day. About three days into the Olympics, we realized we just could not go back to one picture a week!

So a few days ago we shifted gears again. We're now giving you a new image every day, with hotspots to help spur your imagination. Sometimes we'll just show great pictures that we like; sometimes the images will be related to topical events, like the upcoming Labor Day holiday or NFL season kickoff.

We'll occasionally have images from the elections, but rest assured we'll be giving both parties equal time.

And if you don't like the picture you see today, don't worry – there will be a new one tomorrow!

– the Live Search Homepage team