This was a tough decision, since Microsoft is a great company to work for and I have learnt a lot here, had great fun, and best of all, worked with so many smart and passionate people and made so many friends. However, change is a part of life, and after careful evaluation of the pros and cons of leaving, I have decided this shift is the right move for me.

Unfortunately, this means I will be discontinuing this blog on MSDN. I haven't been blogging much recently, but I have enjoyed writing the last 3 years about topics ranging from the .NET Framework and Visual Studio, to Live Search. I will now be taking a break from blogging for a while, but may some day pop up again elsewhere to rejoin the blogosphere.

Till then, thanks for reading and all the encouragement and comments. Good luck and good bye!

As Andy explains, the LinkFromDomain operator lets you find all the sites that a particular site links to (outgoing links). Conversely, the LinkDomain operator can be used to find all sites that link to a given domain (incoming links). While it is fun to play with these, what's really cool about them, as Andy points out in this post on his blog, is that you can combine them in interesting ways and save them away as Search Macros, in essence creating your own little search engine that you can bookmark and share with others.

For example, here is a macro I just created to search the community around Om Malik's blog: https://search.live.com/macros/rvp/gigaom. Its definition is simply:

linkdomain:gigaom.com | linkfromdomain:gigaom.com | site:gigaom.com

Simple, yet powerful!

I specifically want to highlight one of the features in Live Search - Search Macros. If you haven't heard about search macros before, please read my earlier post on the topic, but essentially, it is a way you, as a user, can create your own custom search engine and share it with other users.

In the earlier incarnation of search on Live.com, we offered a beta version of Search Macros that offered a basic experience to create, share and use macros. In the new Live Search, however, you will notice a whole new, vastly improved user experience for this feature. Here are some of the highlights:

1) First of all, there is an easy to remember start page where you can go to get, um, started. You can also get to this from the Live Search results pages by clicking 'More' on the scope bar and selecting 'Edit Macros'.

2) You can now play with the feature and try to create some macros without first having to sign in (you need to sign in only when you are ready to save the macro). The new, wizard like experience to create macros is also very simple and quick to use.

3) You will notice there are now two modes for creating macros - a basic one and an advanced one. The basic one lets you quickly put together a list of sites that should be part of your macro. If your macro is a simple site filter, the basic experience is for you. If, on the other hand, you want to do more powerful customization and use our advanced search operators, you can use the advanced mode. The advanced mode lets you choose from a list of operators, and has a brief description and example for each one to help you get started with using it.

4) One of the cool new features is the 'Test Search' you will notice at the bottom of the page where you define your macro. This lets you quickly compare results from your macro to regular Live Search to test how your macro performs. You can then iteratively edit the macro definition till you like the results.

5) To save your macro, you need to sign in with a Windows Live ID (Passport) account. When you sign in, you will notice a clean new experience to manage your macros and Creator IDs (or namespaces). A Creator ID is something that associates the macro with you, and you can create multiple of these per passport account. For example, my ID is 'rvp', which stands for my full name.

6) Arguably the coolest new feature is the macro home page. For each macro you create, there is a customizable home page that you can bookmark and point friends and other folks to, to use your search engine. What's more, the home page has an easy to remember URL, based on the name of the macro and the Creator ID associated with it. For example, I wrote a macro suited to developers working on the Microsoft platform to search for documentation, samples etc. Its called 'mscoding' and the url is simply:

https://search.live.com/macros/rvp/mscoding

Simple, easy to remember and small!

7) You can find macros that people have chosen to share at the Windows Live Gallery site. Here you can browse through macros by their tags or search for them directly in the search box. You can also find details of the macro, like its definition and description. Adding your own macro here is also easy, and the creation wizard I mentioned earlier will offer you an opportunity to do so.

8) You can find links to the creation page and the gallery from the Live Search results page under the 'More' scope. Also, when you use a macro (or other scope like Video), it will automatically show up in your scope bar, so you can use it again easily next time. That portion of the scope bar is a dynamic, 'most recently used' scopes list, so it will automatically feature the scopes/macros you use most often.

So try the feature out and let us know what you think! Your feedback will be very useful for future iterations of Search Macros, as we continually improve and incorporate new ideas!

 Update: Zachary has posted a nice description of the macros v2 release on the Live Search team blog.

Mike, like Joe Stegman and Mark Rideout (also PMs on the WPF/E team), used to work on .Net Client (my previous team) and Mike's office was right opposite mine. I have worked with these guys quite a bit during the VS 2005/ .NET 2.0 product cycle, and I can confidently say WPF/E is in good hands :-)

Mike, good to see you have a window office now!

1) The live.com team released an update just a few hours ago. Great to see they have addressed some of the top complaints/feature requests! My own favorites are (1) when you issue a search from the toolbar or browser search box, you no longer have to wait for the live.com home page to load (that was annoying!), (2) individual gadgets can now be refreshed and (3) the weather gadget is now a much more reasonable size :-)

2) Microsoft adCenter was officially launched in the US.

3) Windows Live Shopping Beta was launched earlier in the week. You can also search for products through the 'Products' tab in Windows Live Search.

4) Amazon's a9 and Alexa switched to using Windows Live Search as the search provider!

Well, this is the just the beginning of what promises to be an interesting summer for Windows Live!

Haven't heard of Express products before? Read this FAQ.

Not only are the Express products free, they are pretty lightweight and quick to install as well. They are awesome especially for hobbyist and student programmers who want to learn how to code or develop something quickly.

Per the FAQ, SQL Server 2005 Express will continue to be a free download as well.

Now live.com, since its inception, has functioned as a great home page for me. I sure would like it to load faster (and I know the live.com team has performance as one of their top goals right now), but I am quite happy with the way I can personalize it to include the content that I want and the gadgets that I like. It is the page I visit to view all the information I need at a glance, atleast a couple times a day.

However, my pet gripe was that it didn't really function as a 'search page'. It isn't fast enough to load, and the last thing I want to see when I am just about to search for something is that one of my stocks just tanked. Seeing all that content is very distracting while performing a search, and sometimes one forgets what they were planning to look for!

Now, live.com has always had a 'switch' to turn it into a search page. It is the 'hide' link on the top right hand corner, below the 'sign in/sign out' link. If you click 'hide', all your content is hidden and all of a sudden you have a clean page with just a search box at the top. Perfect! However, there were a couple of problems with it - (1) it appeared to me (I may be wrong here) that all my feeds still loaded even when hidden and the search box didn't seem to be ready to type into till everything was loaded, and (2), the 'hide' setting didn't stick in an intuitive way.

Well, the good news is that this is fixed in the recent live.com update! Now there is a setting called 'always start with pages hidden' which is extremely handy if you want live.com to be a clean search page by default, and only view the gadgets/feeds by clicking the 'show' link. The page also loads very fast now in this mode, since gadgets/feeds no longer load up in the background.

I guess that fixes the search page versus home page issue. But you may find live.com as a home page too to be unacceptably slow to load. Well, as I mentioned earlier, the live.com team is hard at work to improve page load performance - it is their top goal right now. For now, though, you can use the option of having multiple pages to improve performance - for example, move the bulk of your slow loading feeds and gadgets to a secondary page, and keep only a few on the main page.

Anyway, turns out I haven't really felt the need to visit a 'search page' in a long time. All the major search services provide toolbars with search boxes that you can type your query into directly (you can try a beta version of the Windows Live Toolbar here). Browsers like Firefox and IE7 have search boxes by default. As these become more mainstream, the concept of a 'search page' may become irrelevant. Going forward, I think search will be perceived more as a service than a webpage.

It is very simple to create a macro (you don't need to be a developer or even a computer geek!). When you do a search on live.com, you will see a 'scope bar' with links like Web, News and Images. Just click the drop down link on the scope bar to access macro functionality and get to the simple create and manage UI (you need to login to a passport account to create macros).

The first time you create a macro, you will need to choose a namespace. A namespace is just a short identifier (like a nickname) that is unique to you and is prepended to your macro names, so that you don't have to compete with everybody else for naming macros.

Once you have created a macro, you will be given an option to share it on Microsoft Gadgets, so other users can discover and use them.

Here are some of the macros I created over the weekend:

rvp.mscoding

rvp.finance

rvp.geeknews

(rvp is my namespace)

A quick search on Technorati suggests some people have already discovered the macro create functionality and started playing with it. Well, if you create any cool ones, do blog about it!

By the way, as part of Friday's update, you may notice that the scroll bar on the live.com web search results page has been changed to a more 'traditional' looking one, familiar to Windows users. Kudos to the UI team on promptly responding to user feedback on that!

Update: Zachary (Search PM) has added a blog entry about Search Macros on the official search team blog.

Well, the conference has just started - look for more announcements and goodies later this week! There are quite a few interesting sessions. Here are a couple of search related ones: