Wed 26 Nov 2008
The MSDN & TechNet Search team have made some improvements to their search engine.
Here’s a quick walk-through….
Want to perform a search? Type in your terms!
Hmm… You’re not on SQL Server 2008 yet? Click on “SQL Server 2005″ in the Refine by Topic list:
Perhaps you also want to refine to Support Knowledge Base articles? Click on that link!
Also, please notice that there is an RSS feed option ( 
) , and a time-to-get-results indicator (0.1 seconds in this case):
My thoughts?
Searching is fast. Once you have a preliminary result set (no filters refinements, just search terms), that resultset is cached and reused in subsequent searches. That rocks and causes adding refinements to be that much faster. Kudus to the team.
Using refinements is a huge win-win for everyone. It helps the consumer (you) get the results needed in an intuitive fashion. It also helps Microsoft deliver a tool that works successfully to enable consumers to do their work effectively and efficiently.
Try the search today. Also take a look at the “Code Search” feature and let me know what you think. Note that the code search is pretty much a beta feature and has a ways to go to be ready for “prime time.”
Links:
- MSDN Search: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/search/
- TechNet Search: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/search/
November 26th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Thanks for the post, Phil. Note to your readers that there is a search provider available from the site that works in FF and IE. IE8 will automatically add an accelerator as well.
November 26th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Hi Phil – thanks for the kind words! (I’m on the team that builds the search on MSDN.)
Yep, we worked really hard on performance for this release, and on making it much more clear which search results correspond to which products.
If you or your readers want to learn more details about these and other improvements in MSDN & TechNet Search, check out the MSDN & TechNet Search Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/msdnsearchblog/
If you have a suggestion for MSDN or TechNet search, or want to report a search problem, visit our Forum at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/SearchFeedback/threads/
Thanks!
Justin Grant
MSDN
November 26th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Despite those efforts (because I don’t want to diminish them), Microsoft’s search is still substantially inferior to the point of being unusable.
Try this search term on for size:
“SSIS DT_TEXT”
What am I looking for? You get one guess, and I know you’ll be right. Search that on MSDN, and the page I want is #22. Refine that by Library articles only, and it’s now #20. Refine that by SQL 2008 only, and it’s #10. But search that on Google, it’s at #2. Search it on Live.com and it’s not even in the top 100.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the refine capabilities. There are definitely times when I’m searching for things and I don’t want to see library articles (because I read them all and they didn’t help) – I want to see blog posts or something else. That’s neat.
But it doesn’t help at all if the result you need is buried ten pages away, or just two.
November 26th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Responding to Todd McDermid – Hi Todd. I’m part of the team which builds MSDN Seach. Thanks for the feedback– reporting specific relevance issues like this one is a great way to help us improve.
The DT_TEXT case is a weird one for two reasons:
1. the best page is a “group” page– there’s no page for “DT_TEXT” alone. This is unusual for MSDN– we almost always try to give “API” pages (where there’s a specific keyword you use to look it up) their own page, partially to make it easier for seach engines to find a single “best” page to correspond to that API/Keyword’s name.
2. some documents in the SSIS docs contain “(SSIS)” in the title and some don’t. Live Search, at our request, prioritizes words in the title very high for MSDN content so we can get the best match for class names, method names, language keywords, etc. which are always in the title
So an optimization for words-in-titles which usually helps actually hurts in this case.
I’m following up with the Live Search team about this problem to see if they have a good idea for how to fix this. If Live can’t fix it, I’ll pass on the feedback to the SQL Documentation team that they might want to consider putting that disambiguator (e.g. SSIS) in all their documents, not just ones which have duplicate titles elsewhere in SQL documentation.
If you run into other cases where relevance isn’t what you like, or you have a suggestion or bug report for MSDN Search, feel free to post at our forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/SearchFeedback/threads/
Thanks,
Justin Grant
MSDN
November 26th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Yep, great feedback, Todd. I’ll pass that along to the search team.
(For those reading along, the page Todd’s referring to is the “Integration Services Data Types” page.)
I suppose from a taxonomy perspective that page is no different than any other that has those terms in them. With that said, we have a page that contains definitions, and as such, in the “library” source refinement category, definition pages should carry more weight than kb articles, white papers, etc… Perhaps.
Also, with that said, a more proper search could be “ssis data types,” (where your page returns as #1) but then you shouldn’t *have* to make a “broad” search like that when all you want is to search by one data type.
Note: Actually, for me, Google returned that page as #12 in the list. Google is a funny thing – consistent results it does not provide. (And this may be based, in part, on click statistics and/or my logged-in Google profile, region of the country, who knows…)
November 26th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Justin/Todd,
I’ve forwarded this page to the SSIS documentation team to provide them some feedback on how they may be able to improve the ability to search for Integration Services related terms.
Thanks,
Phil