MSN Search Feature Requests

Summary: Feature requests for the web search component of MSNSearch

If you've got a feature request of your own, and it's not already here, then add it to the list and explain how it would help!
If you've got suggestions for the desktop search component, use DesktopSearchFeatureRequests instead.

"Look up word" too smart

I've started using MSN Search as a quick reference dictionary. The problem is that many times I'll enter in a word and the quick answer at the top will be an Encarta reference article rather than the definition. While I appreciate that the arcticle is more in depth, when I say look up word, I really just want to look up the word; if I wanted the article, I would have searched Encarta. It would certainly be nice if the definition had a link to more in depth information, but that need to be secondary to the definition itself. Thanks.

Advanced Search delineators

It's been repeated in bits in this wiki, but bears (yet another) repeat: Support more functionality!

I'd strongly advise MSN Search to add the exact same restrictors as Google, because that would reduce the "learning curve" and hence cost of shifting. MSN Desktop Search has some VERY good restrictors, if you know them; I was disappointed to see the same wasn't respected for MSN Web Search.

Sure, it won't be used by a majority of web customers, but at the moment they aren't - or shouldn't be - your target market. Right now, you're best bet is to get the "early adopters" who like to stay on the "bleeding edge" to switch - who'll hence recommend other, less tech-savvy consumers to use your search engine. So adding advanced operaters is a ...good idea :) - Michael Griffiths

All the geek-seek tools -- wildcards, proximity operators, bracketing

As a linguist who uses the Web as a source of linguistic data, I'd love to have access to the kinds of tools that AltaVista (AV) classic gave us till Yahoo killed it last April (RIP):
* wildcards, preferably anywhere in a word (i.e. not just after 3 or more chars), with say *** standing for 0-5 chars, ? for exactly 1 char and % for 0 or 1 char
* proximity operators for NEAR, BEFORE and AFTER (AV actually supported all 3, though only the first was documented, and even allowed you to specify up to how many words away to look)
* bracketing with unlimited nesting and joining by various operator (AND OR NEAR...)
* unlimited query length, which permits very targeted searches
* How 'bout regular expression search while you're at it?
As a realist I know that only a small number of searchers use these features effectively, and that documenting them on a help page could scare off Joe / Jane Quick-Click. They also could bog down your servers. But they would be of inestimable value to serious researchers in academic and commercial settings. Possible solutions:
* make such features available only through an API
* require registration
* restrict use to .edu domain
I know this will not be a commercial succes or moneymaker, but it would be one way for Microsoft to repay academics for our huge investment in the Microsoft platform, an investment from which Microsoft continues to profit after our students have graduated. -- BillF

Be the server

This is kind of a wild-and-crazy idea. I imagine one of the biggest operating expenses is the server farms... maintenance etc. Why not let your users be your servers? Seriously. As an optional part of the desktop search application, have them download/install a "MSN Server" program which lazily runs MSNbot queries or even holds part of the index.

Of course you'd have to worry about people sniffing the wire and sending fake data back. But there are probably ways around this - sending the same bit of data to several different clients, and looking askance at any client that returns results that look wrong (different from the others.) -- Maurits

Expose a SOAP Webservice

MSN Search needs to expose a SOAP webservice (defined by a WSDL file, of course) to extend Internet search capabilities into third party applications. Google's Web API is an example of what NOT to do, however. Google's API is broken in that it returns HTML content (some tags, mostly bold tags). This assumes that the receiving application can render HTML (or wants to render the content as HTML). This also breaks with the separation of design and data, which is crucial in good software development, at least in my opinion.
Moreover, the Google Search API lacks any commercial use, that is, you are limited to 1000 searches. This prevents new commercial apps from being made. MSN Search ought to at least offer the option of buying more, if not offer them for free. I have more complaints about Google's API, but they are not particularly relevant at this time. -- TheDoomBringer

Expose content in other formats

Although a SOAP Webservice, would be wonderful, extend multiple formats instead of only html, would be great too. Right now Beta Search gives us RSS and XML format with queryparameters, but only web and news search, what about images, and so on? -- Solrac

Find Image By Example

Often I want to find out where a particular image came from that is on a site. It would be nice to enter the full image URL and get a reply of where that image is located. [Two additional "features" - first, upload a file that is on the HD to use in search, and second, show similar images. -- RADMoose

Firefox users want their right mouse button back

I was just at the MSN Web site (26 May 2005) and tried to right click on a link so that I might open it in a new tab in Firefox. Evidently, the MSN guys have made it so that this is not possible in Firefox. What purpose does that serve, other than to cripple Firefox on MSN sites? It just seems so petty to me, although I'm sure the official explanation will make it sound like it was for our good.

Google-compatible search expressions

Support for link:, site:, lang: and other Google keywords. Go here for a list of advanced Google features: http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html - Michael Griffiths

Highlight keywords in cached page

When displaying cached page, highlight all search keywords so I don't need to use browser search. Google does this.

Mobile Devices

It would be great if MSN Search would also be available on mobile devices, such as WAP-enabled phones. The only thing you need to do is render the search page and search results pages in Wireless Markup Language (WML). Of course, you wouldn't be able to view the actual web pages that show up in the search results, but frequently the search results page itself gives enough information, especially when doing a news search. What do you think? This would make MSN Search very useful on the go and it's not too hard to implement. -- GVW

More Results Per Page and More Total Results

I would like the option to have at least 100 search results on one page. Search results are limited to 300 results, I would like that to be at least 1000 results. -- Theobeest

News: Search by source

On Yahoo and Google you can do a News search and specify that only results from a particular news source be returned (Wall Street Journal, Time, NBC, etc.) -- Maurits

Remembered Searches

On ebay they have the last 3 things you viewed, well MSN search should have something similar, when ive gone 10 pages deep into a search or possibly when ive searched for something new and then thought, damn what was that last page i went to or the first page i went to, i'd like it to be at the bottom of the list (hideable with a +). -- Jaz

Restrict Search by Filetype

There are times I want to find Powerpoint decks. Or just Word documents. For example, if I wanted a marketing plan template, I'd want to append filetype:doc to my "marketing plan template" query to eliminate all the junk I don't want. -- Sspencer

Restrict Search by Keyword in the URL

This is an important feature for SEO's so they can figure out how much of certain directories or certain dynamic files are getting indexed. For example, on Google or Yahoo! one could search for inurl:products site:www.kohls.com to see all the product pages that are in the index. There's no reliable way to do this on the new MSN Search.

This is a useful feature for general users too. For example, how would one do a search for the word scoble within just the MSN Search Blog? Using Google or Yahoo it's a cinch: scoble inurl:msnsearch site:blogs.msdn.com -- Sspencer

Saved Searches

I'd like the ability to see the top 5 placements for a keyword via RSS. For example, if I owned widgets.com, I'd do a search for "widgets". I'd like a link I can feed to my RSS reader that would give me news articles like:

		  Widgets.org (#4) and Widgets.info (#3) switched ranks
	

-- Maurits

Save Search and Webpages

I suggest that you have a service that provide following features
* My Jeeve Features: Save search, web page, organize them into folder, allow notes and tagging (should implement interface like G-Mail Labels)
* Google History Features: Auto save search result, clicked link. Extent: 2 search button search&save and Search no save
* Your own features:
* Save webpage to downloadable format (I prefer .mht)
* Searchable from desktop search, MSN search
* Allow sharing and download to community or friend, publishing to MSN space --> Social networking
* Automatically categorize or label saved pages (some how like stumbleupon but personal)
* Buy Stumbleupon to add their features
It would be great if you could provide a toolbar or addin that do those features from result of Google search, YahooSearch, AskJeeve search but save to your service. That should benefit me, but MS too because it could generate ad revenue (when browing history) and attracting Google and Yahoo users to your MSN search.
The value I get is that I can save, access and share any webpage I read. TanNg

Search UI for ALL searches

Recently, I checked out the MSN Search Stock Quote Search. I got, of course, this: http://moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/webquote.dll?iPage=qd&Symbol=MSFT

This is a different UI - you're driving information TO a MSN Service, and not EXTRACTING the information from the service - which would be better. This is the same note as the new (very nice) Google feature for movies - sample search, Seattle: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=movie%3A98101&btnG=Search

Applying the information found in the table in the MSN Money page for MSN in a similar table in the MSN Search would be far better.

Site: Be able to do subdirectory-specific site searches

I really like "site:foo.com", but I'd really like to be able to do "site:foo.com/bar" so that I can restrict the search results to a specific subdirectory of that site. This would be useful in enabling searches to sites like blogs.msdn.com, where one directory down gets you a huge variety of sub-sites. Google lets you do something close to this with a combination of site: and inurl:, although it would be nice to just do it all in site:, because then you can specifically require it to be a certain subsite instead of just anywhere in the URL. -- kclemson

Site: Show rankings for popular searches, given a site

As a site owner, I'd like to be able to enter my site name (foo.com) and see which search results put my site at or near the top. The search results should be queries - ordered by a weighted combination of ranking and query popularity. For example, if a search term is entered 5,000 times a day, and my site is #2, that should be near the top. If a search term is entered 200 times a day, and my site is #1, that should be around the middle. If a search term is entered once a day, and my site is #5, that should be near the bottom. -- Maurits

Incorporate CollaborativeRank into the ranking function to encourage people to provide helpful/timely external hyperlinks on their home pages

You can find a demo of CollaborativeRank using del.icio.us data here:

http://collabrank.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/del.icio.us/

Users on del.icio.us who give meaningful tags to helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently doing the same) will be rewarded with higher CollaborativeRank, which means that their tagging will have greater influence on this search engine's rankings.

You could do something similar, but this time using hyperlinks on people's home pages.

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WINDOWS VISTA - Indexing TIF files

I have a large archive with several years of files scanned, OCR-ed and stored in TIF format. The MODI filter that has been included with MS Office since version 2000 (I think) took care of indexing the OCR-ed text. Not any more. In Vista it does not work. I would like to see the MODI filter working again.