This SDK update includes code samples in VB and C# for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, an updated online help file (CHM), and several new, important features. The new functionality available through the MSN Search Web Service includes:

Support for all markets (CultureInfo) currently available through MSN Search (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/MSN_Search_Web_Service_SDK/HTML/F_Namespace_SearchRequest_CultureInfo.asp for a complete list).

PhoneBook (Local) results that return Title, Description, and Url fields as well as additional PhoneBook-specific fields such as the Phone number, an Address object that contains constituent parts of an address, and a Location object that includes the latitude and longitude of the search result. The Location object used as input for the query now includes a Radius field, enabling you to set the range of the search.

Support for SearchTags (metadata that is indexed by the MSN Search Engine).

For more information, see the updated reference guide at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/MSN_Search_Web_Service_SDK/HTML/IntroducingTheMSNSearchWebService.asp or download the updated SDK at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C271309B-02DE-42A7-B23E-E19F68667197&displaylang=en.

Enjoy!

I have noticed that I cannot get more than 50 results back. Is this a new limit?

I am using the SourceRequest.Count = 1000 and 9 come back. Any number up to 50 works but anything over 50 only brings in 9 records.

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks.

Hi Marco, thanks for your continued use of the MSN Search Web Service API and your thoughtful questions in the forum. The limit that you ran into has been present since our launch and the behavior is as expected. Count has an upper limit of 50 and specifies the number of results per page. A requested value for Count of greater than 50 results causes the service to reset the Count to the default of 10 results per page.

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the explanation, it did clear things up.

Will the maximum results of 250 be changed? Will the commercial version have a higher limit? I have sent an email a few weeks ago regarding the commercial version but I have not had a response yet. Is there a way that you could check the status?

Thank you again.

Thanks for the interest in SearchTags. We are working to document it more thoroughly, however, I hope that this post will be able to make you productive as we put our documentation together.

There are two parts to SearchTags. The first part is the encoding on your pages and the second part is the retrieval at query time. For the purposes of this example I am going to assume that you have a website at example.com

Part 1: Encoding SearchTags on your pages
Placing SearchTags on your pages involves using the HTML Meta element in order to encode data in a structured name=value format. Here are two examples of what you could put in your document.

Document A contains <meta name="Search.Interest" content="Mountain Biking">

Document B contains <meta name="Search.Interest" content="Road Biking">

All of the usual HTML Specification rules about syntax apply. You need to properly close your quotes etc. Also note that your variable name here must start with "Search.". So if you wanted to have a variable name called "Foo" then it would be "Search.Foo"

Part 2: Retreiving SearchTags
If you wanted to retrieve all documents that contain a SearchTag which match term [biking] you would issue the following query:

site:example.com meta:search.interest(Biking)

If, however, you wanted to restrict your query to only those pages that match the exact phrase "Road Biking" then you would issue the query as follows

site:example.com meta:search.interest("Road Biking")

Frequently Asked Questions

Hopefully this will grow over time as folks ask more questions, however, here are a couple of questions that we commonly receive from folks.

Q. Is there a limit to the number of SearchTags I can have on a page?

A. No. MSN Search, however, does have limits with regards to how much data it will index from a single page and SearchTags do count against that overall limit. We recommend that you do not have pages larger than 150KB.

Q. Will SearchTags influence how my pages rank on MSN Search / Live.com?

A. No

Q. How is this useful?

A. SearchTags are designed to help site owners build up web search solutions that allow for more structured searches. Imagine you have a piece of information such as "Rating" that you wish search engines would understand so users could filter on it, this is the way to do so.

Thanks again and send along any questions!

eytan

--

Lead Program Manager

MSN Search

mp2005 wrote:

Any more info about SearchTags? How to use them, etc?

Thanks James,

And I will enjoy!

lowster11

Computer Support & Web Design of Sacramento

I have tired adding MS Live Search web reference (http://soap.search.msn.com/webservices.asmx?wsdl) to a vs2005 project (the project is of type workflow library - .Net Framework 3.0). Once I enter the url and, after services discovery, i click add web reference... The web reference is added but I also get the error:
Error 1 Custom tool error: Unable to import WebService/Schema. Value does not fall within the expected range.

Any ideas what might be wrong?