A Custom Search Engine for the Developer and Platform Group in Microsoft Ireland

Want to create a custom search engine? It's pretty easy! All you need to do is to create a Live search macro for any topic, and a home page is automatically created for your macro so that you can bookmark it / share it etc - you just use the wizard and either specify a list of web sites or use full Live Search in conjunction with operators to create a custom search. You can create any number of macros for hobbies / work and even share them with other Windows Live users on the Windows Live Gallery.

Here's what the search engine homepage for the Developer and Platform Group in Microsoft Ireland looks like:

Currently it searches using the following definition:

site:http://blogs.msdn.com/ronang OR site:http://blogs.msdn.com/ckeogh OR site:http://blogs.msdn.com/martharotter OR site:http://blogs.msdn.com/ireland OR site:http://blogs.technet.com/daven OR http://blogs.msdn.com/clare_dillon

And here's what a typical set of results looks like:

 

It's a pretty neat way of limiting the scope of your searches. If you want to take things a step further you could take a look at the Live Search Interactive SDK which would allow you to

Create a custom search engine with our search query language

Enhance your existing site search with spelling suggestions, images, news articles, feeds and phonebook results

Add images or phonebook results to your mashup

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Developer, Windows Live Search, Ireland, Search Macro, ronang

 

Cross posted from ronan's blog