Live Search relevance 'improved'

4 October 2007

The relevance of results offered by Microsoft's updated Live Search has been improved, according to the firm.

In an official Live Search blog post, the company explains that the significance of results is "a hard thing to quantify or qualify".

Microsoft adds that it is important for more obscure search terms to yield results of similar relevance to those provided for common searches.

The "snippets" - short sections of the target site which aim to clarify its content within the search results - have also been updated.

Changes include greater compatibility with websites which use javascript, as well as the ability to expand acronyms such as FBI for greater clarity.

While the total number of pages indexed has increased to 20 billion, Microsoft asserts that the level of spam in results has been lowered.

"Experts on our team take a randomly selected and statistically significant set of searches and measure the percentage of spam in the results," the search engine explains.

This figure is said to be down in a "non-trivial manner" in recent testing.

Microsoft previously stated that usability issues such as contrast and spacing have also been tackled in the new Live Search release.

Category: MSN