1月26日
Spaces Search – what’s going on?
MSN Spaces users – we’ve heard you, and we know that you’ve been itching for a better search feature for spaces! So we worked hard to give you lots of different ways to search for stuff and for other people using MSN Spaces. You’ll soon be able to search for blogs on specific topics, MSN Spaces on certain topics, find specific people based on name, location, age, gender, and more, and browse for people based on the things they said they’re interested in.
In fact, you can do all this searching and browsing now, but you may find the results you get back aren’t as, shall we say, “satisfying” as you may want. The search functionality works in some complicated (and sometimes mysterious J ways) but as we write this, and as you read this, we’re working on making your search experience better.
At this point in time, there are two “ingredients” we need to make MSN Spaces search as perfect as it can be. You can help with both.
Here’s the first: add content to your MSN Space! This means you should publish what your interests are in your profile. Add some blog entries and post some photos. The more content you add, the more stuff there will be to search on.
Here’s the second: time. In order to make your content on MSN Spaces “searchable,” our search crawler needs to go out and crawl your content. Hmmm, this sounds kind of circular, you may be thinking. Well, maybe that sentence was, but the way this works isn’t J: on Jan 25th we added a whole bunch of new code to spaces.msn.com. Some of it you can see (like some new features and new design) and some of it you can’t. The stuff you can’t see is code we added to your MSN Spaces pages that will make them searchable. And like we said above, it takes some time for our crawler to go out and crawl your MSN Spaces pages with this new search code on them.
So today, our search results may not look so hot. Three days from now, those results will look better. And a week or two from now, those results will look pretty darned good, and so on.
Stick around, help us out and send us feedback! You can leave a comment here, on the Space Craft, or you can send some feedback. (By the way, this link is at the bottom of every page on MSN Spaces). Rest assured, we really do read all of your feedback!