Monthly Archives: February 2009

New apps and features from Live Search

I’ve been meaning to highlight a few of the cool things we’re doing in Live Search. I don’t have any direct involvement in the development of any of these—I just think they’re cool.

Answer Suggestions for IE8

IE8 is awesome, so go get it. Live Search has these things called Instant Answers where it can respond with succinct answers to your question, rather than just web pages that may have the answer. Good examples are weather and numeric conversions—you just want to know the answers, not necessarily follow links to find it.

You get normal search suggestions of course, but the cool thing is that the display of the instant answers is built right into IE8. You can type into the search box and have the answers returned right in the drop down as you type. Here are some samples:

Weather:answers_ie8_2 Solve math equations:

answers_ie8_1 There are a whole lot more kinds of answers. Maybe someday I’ll detail them.

Live Search Suggestions for Firefox

Firefox users haven’t been left out either. While there isn’t a full instant answers integration, Firefox does support search suggestions. You can download the plugin from the Firefox plugin directory.

firefox_live

Live Search for Windows Mobile

This is something I think really needs more publicity. I have a Samsung Saga i770, which I love. One of the first things I put on it was Live Search Mobile.

First of all, this thing has had speech recognition built-in since way before Google’s similar tools.

Easy to use, and optimized for your phone

It can easily find directions, gas prices, movies, traffics, maps, local businesses (by categories), and general web info. I use this app all the time.

There is custom software you can install for both Windows Mobile and Blackberry. It will work on the web for any other mobile phone that can get on the Internet.

And, by the way, it supports auto-suggest as well.

On your phone, you can go to wls.live.com to get it.

Related links:

Updated CPU usage article

I made a important changes to the CPU usage code and have updated the article to reflect it. Instead of a critical section, the code uses just the interlocked increment/decrement functions. I also updated the sample demo to use multiple threads to read the CPU usage to demonstrate the thread safety clearly.