Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Microsoft officials also claim "substantial improvements" in Live Search's ability to determine the intent of a query, taking into consideration spelling mistakes, punctuation, synonyms and stop words (common words such as 'the' or 'and' that are typically ignored when searching). Furthermore, additional click-stream data is used to help improve the ranking and relevance of results.
The company has made a special effort with content in the categories of entertainment, shopping, health and local search, as they account for up to 40 percent of searches.
Live Search is supposed to provide "specialized responses to queries about specific areas such as weather, images, celebrities and entertainment, sports, stocks, Yellow Pages, maps or quick facts from Encarta", but when we asked "show me a map of Australia", the first two images returned were maps of India. Questions such as "what is the capital of Norway" were answered correctly.
Another new feature is support for macros, which allow searches to be restricted according to various criteria, with the 'formula' being saved for personal use or for sharing with others. For example, searches can be restricted to pages with RSS or Atom feeds, or pages containing 'pineapple' can be prioritised when searching for 'fruit'.
Other improvements announced by Microsoft, including video search, do not appear to be active yet.
"With this update to Live Search, our engineering focus is on the areas that matter most to our 185 million consumers who use our service every month. We have made dramatic progress in delivering a better search experience to our customers," said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of the search and advertising platform group at Microsoft.
"We know what kinds of things consumers are searching for, and we have invested in those key high-interest verticals, including entertainment, shopping, health and local search. With the core platform in place we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time."
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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