Christopher Payne's Space

MSN Search and location

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 00:04:57 GMT

One of the recent additions to MSN search that I enjoy is that I can now type in the word weather and it will try to figure out your location based on your IP address and the return to you the current weather conditions along with a 5 day forecast. You can also type in a city name followed by the word weather and it will give you the weather information for this location. I am a fan of us using IP and other information to figure out locaiton and then direct the results when appropriate to that location. For example a query for Movies will use the same technology to determine your location and give you a list of movies playing at a nearby cinema. Also local keywords like Fedex or Plumber and it will also try to use your location and give you a listing "answer" for relevant businesses near year.

Reverse IP is not perfect by any means. I was using my Verizon EVDO modem the other day and tried the weather query and got the weather for some location on the east coast even though I was in the Sacramento area -- cleary not what I was looking for. However, it is often close and this will improve over time when combined with other technologies such as using Wireless 802.11 SSIDs to approximate your location. We currently use this in local.live.com in addition to IP addrees but we are not yet using this in core web search. Here is a post from Chandu on the Live local team talking about the features and how we are using the technology and how we are protecting privacy which is absolutely essential with this type of feature.

Right now we use this technology to insert a relevant local "answer" above the core result. The web results themselves are not currently altered in the above features. We are also working on doing this with core web results. We are trying this currently with a feature called near me. This feature attempts to categorize results based on an infered location. Here is the detail on this feature from a post back in 04. You can see this on the site when you click through to a local search result such as the following. In this example I chose a nearby city to seattle -- Bellevue. The restaurant is acutally located in Seattle. We get the main web site for the restaurant but get confused on later results where there is one apparently from Boston. This is not an exactly science at this point but it can often be helpful in getting to the "right" local page.

This theme of altering results based on location I think is an important one and one that can really make it easier to find information that is relevant to your current position without have to jump through a lot of hoops. Clearly this work is just beginning on our engine and others but it will evolve rapidly.

Christopher

New Instant Answers on MSN Search

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 04:08:51 GMT

Very cool new answers on MSN Search thanks to the Encarta team. I like the weather and holiday ones best. Just type in and memorial day in 2006 it will tell you the date. Type in rainfall in seattle and hopefully you won't get as depressed as I do. There is a ton of stuff here.

Photo Album: Disney World 2007

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:53:42 GMT

Disney World 2007

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Photo Album: December 02

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 23:18:01 GMT

December 02

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Photo Album: Labor Day

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 15:49:35 GMT

Labor Day

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Photo Album: Liberty and David Wedding

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 06:58:50 GMT

Liberty and David Wedding

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Photo Album: June 18

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 16:55:47 GMT

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Photo Album: Hawaii 06

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 19:37:28 GMT

Hawaii 06

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Photo Album: March 19

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:29:50 GMT

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Photo Album: Fall 05

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 23:00:50 GMT

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Custom List: Important Links

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 20:20:18 GMT

Important Links

Mariners O6 Schedule