yes as the rest of the world shout about how great the new live maps are .. in the UK we only get MultiMaps.. on the plus side multimaps is a better mapping solution for the UK anyway,

DaveN

This has to be good news for all,

· HTTP Compression: HTTP compression allows faster transmission time by compressing static files and application responses, reducing network load between your servers and our crawler. We support the most common compression methods: gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616 (see sections 14.11 and 14.39). Compression is currently supported by all major browsers and search engines. Use this online tool to check your server for HTTP compression support.

The following links provide configuration information for IIS, and Apache.

• • Configure Compression in IIS
  • Configure Apache using GZIP or using deflate

· Conditional Get: We support conditional get as defined by RFC 2616 (Section 14.25), generally we will not download the page unless it has changed since the last time we crawled it. As per the standard, our crawler will include the “If-Modified-Since” header & time of last download in the GET request and when available, our crawler will include the “If-None-Match” header and the ETag value in the GET request. If the content hasn’t changed the web server will respond with a 304 HTTP response. Use .

To check if your site already supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, you can use this online tool to check your server for HTTP Conditional Get support. Alternatively, you can check using Fiddler for Internet Explorer, or Live Headers for Firefox. Each of these tools allows you to create a custom GET request and send it to your server. You’ll want to make sure that your request includes the “If-Modified-Since” header like the following simplified sample:

GET /sa/3_12_0_163076/webmaster/webmaster_layout.css HTTP/1.1

Host: webmaster.live.com

If-Modified-Since: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:28:49 GMT

You should receive a server response similar to the following simplified sample:

HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified

Check out MSDN for more information on using Fiddler for performance tuning.

If you have not yet configured conditional get on your site, we would strongly encourage you to do so, as it can significantly help reduce server load as most browsers and crawlers already support this feature (e.g. IIS, Apache).

In addition to these two features there are many more improvements in performance that should help further optimize our crawling. As a result, we’ve also upgraded our user agent to reflect the changes, it is now “msnbot/1.1″. If you think you are experiencing any issues with MSNbot, or have any questions about the updates, please use our Crawler Feedback & Discussion form.

– Fabrice Canel, Live Search Crawling Team

Ok here’s mine and why

Google : Search basically. Everything about it is so far ahead of the competition, the results, the cleanness of the interface, how adwords integrates !

Live : apart from the people ( we love you guy’s) for me it’s the little extra bits that live does, the video search, 3D Maps, the review of products, the health vertical etc etc

Yahoo : Flickr !!! it’s simply the best

Ask : I like the fact that Barry likes them :) … and Bloglines !!!

DaveN

I love cracking titles like that.. ;)

anyway, when I was in Redmond I Got a demo of this technology and the beta is out in the UK now..

search for Phil Collins and you should see a link for:

Phil Collins Celebrity xRank :270

if my memory is correct there where 4 icons, up and down arrows showing movement, an arrow point into a blackhole and a rocket showing fast movers up and down..

screenshots on SearchSpice

DaveN Viva Forever

link to live.com search

Here is the flash video again whats amazing about this and I’m mean amazing is that all the reviews are algo driven, Live use some really kick arse tech to:

a) find the products
b) find the reviews
c) decide whether the review is Positive or Negative
d) and what categories to create

honestly I think last week i saw the future of search, the way google, yahoo and ask will follow, if history has taught me one thing, nothing stays static, people arranging dinner via Facebook, People using youtube for product launches. and then we have verticals this is the future, this is where you choose your search engine for the kind of person you are not just for relevancy because in honesty that will be secondary, What live did with the Digital Cameras search and yes even the Viagra search was awesome if they can flip the switch and show the shopping vertical and Health verticals before organic, SEO’s job just became really really different!

Dave

When I was at Microsoft last week, I got chance to dig a little deeper into the “Fall Launch” .. one of the things was the search term Traffic

I have popped a really quick flash demo here For all the UK and Euro peeps that can see it.

Basically you type Traffic into the search box on Live.com which quicky does a reverse lookup on your IP address and shows you traffic data overlaid on Live Maps.

DaveN

So this is the Lobby of Building 88 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, And where my Day at Microsoft began

9:45 -10am
Arrive at Microsoft, first Impression it’s just like Yahoo or Google except it’s White in fact I would say very white, I checked in and waited for my first Meeting

10am–11am : Leon Warman

Leon takes me to his Office and the first thing I notice is That EVERYONE has their own office ! we chatted about spam in the index and how LIVE was combating it, what things I had seen, mainly techniques, rather than sites.

11am-12pm Webmaster Tools : Nathan Buggia

Leon was supposed to take me to Nathan’s office but we had just started to over run when Nathan turned up. I ended up in a meeting room where Nathan promptly told me to be honest with the team about how I felt about http://webmaster.live.com which is the beta of the live webmaster portal. It’s Weak I say very weak, Nathan has just loaded slide one .. and to be honest we never got to slide 2, but this was one of my favourite meetings, we chatted about what webmasters needs are, what would make people like me use Live over the competitors, at present live webmaster portal has :

Summary  of your site which basically lets me see that www.davidnaylor.co.uk Domain rank and that it’s not blocked, my top 5 pages and last crawl date

Profile : is basically where I have my XML Sitemap etc

Keywords : at present this is where you can add a keyword and see how your site is performing in live search but I just don’t get it, we chatted about how this could be improved and what I would do…. If they implement my ideas I reckon 50 to 99% of the webmasters would use it.

12pm-1pm Gatineau Team

I think I’m one of the first NON US people to be on this beta, again very open discussion. One thing which has impressed me with all the Microsoft teams I have been with is their openness to what webmasters like me want. Now Gatineau has a way to go yet, but the things I like about it and the ideas that I brought to the table seem to all be doable. We talked about ROI tracking to split testing landing pages, to consoles for webmasters – web marketers – Company owners, what the needs are and why we are so different

1pm-2pm Live.com’s Fall Launch Deep, Sebastian Gard

I could have spent all day with Sebastian, I don’t think I added much to the conversation, lol the more Sebastian showed me what they had pushed out in the fall the more I heard myself saying wow.. from live traffic maps to digital cameras to Viagra .. yes Viagra I was very very impressed..
I loved the fact that the medical stuff is on Https giving the user the ability to search on sensitive issues without the ability of been tracked.. thumbs up Live.com .

2pm-3pm Business Operations Rotimi Olumide

Rotimi made me laugh, he is another real good guy. We discussed UK market share and how Live could get more from the UK. I so want to share my ideas with everyone on this but at the moment I will leave them at Live.

3:30pm-5:00pm Speaker Series

I did my Powerpoint then a Q+A with the audience, then some 1 on 1 with the spam team .. AND most of the off the shelf products to spam the indexes have footprints !! .. the spam team know they still have a way to go but they seem hungry and motivated which isn’t a good thing for spammers lol

7:15pm-11pm Dinner at Etta’s Seafood

Nathan drove me and him to the restaurant he explained how there are only two routes into Seattle from Redmond and as 30,000 other Microsoft cars slowly moved down the freeway, we chatted about about Microsoft, life and living in the Seattle area.

Nathan then showed me the Seattle GUM Wall and decide to see if he could get me drunk and lick it … Eck..

DaveN

So the week started the a bottle of wine with Vanessa Fox, as i joked about her newly shaven pussy ( really Vanessa took a photo even) we sat in her beautiful home which has the sea just outside her patio, watching DR Phil … Hmmmm I thought I recognised a manly figure on the show but Vanessa told me I was mistaken. Vanessa dropped me back at my hotel leaving her a cool 2 hours to sleep and pack for Vegas ..

The Next Day I worked until around 2pm and grabbed a town car and shot into Seattle with a mission of getting secretly inside the Seomoz high security pit. I had many ideas, scaling walls kicking down doors, instead I Opted for using the intercom. Once I had gained entry the mozzers who were in total awe or surprise quickly started entertaining me, mainly by pulling the office apart !!! BTW I shot a Video with Rand for his whiteboard Fridays..

The Next day was Microsoft … its started around 9:45 in the morning and ended around 11pm, the day was a mixture of what they are doing, what they have done and my view and opinions on the 2 beta tests that I begged for, Webmaster Portal and Gatineau

DaveN

As Microsoft live services come out of Beta giving you web and desktop apps. Perhaps it’s time for us to tip our hats to the mighty big M.

Ok, the @live email folk are grumbling,  but from a business point of view what software do you use  ? Let me guess you were forced down the Microsoft route years ago? You just had to stay though didn’t you ;)

With the focus once again on social networks and actively sharing information Microsoft is a smart cookie indeed. Something is in my eye sorry, must be a Popfly-

Microsoft have recently purchased Jellyfish.com which is really a high end comparative shopping engine with a community twist. I guess Microsoft is building up it’s shopping channels in live search. Links : Live Blog and Jellyfish