Thanks,
Phil

(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…)

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

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.

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