MSN Search Champs Program

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://office.weblogsinc.com/entry/0276273415216838/' target='_blank'>http://office.weblogsinc.com/entry/0276273415216838/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Well, the cat is out of the bag. Scoble blogged about it yesterday. Liz Lawley has announced she’s going. eWeek just released a story about it. So I guess it’s safe to chime in and announce that I too have been invited to join the MSN Search Champs program. I will be travelling to Redmond on Sunday to spend two days working with the MSN Search team. This event will begin an ongoing engagement to assist in evaluating their forthcoming search technologies and it’s both an honor and an exciting opportunity to help influence an important aspect of the computing experience."</i><br /><br />The above quote is by Marc Orchant from The Office Weblog, and it sums up what I'm going to be doing for the next couple of days. I've been asked to be an MSN Search Champ, and as Marc explains, it will involve giving feedback to the MSN Search team on their products. I don't know much more than that, but I'll be spending Monday and Tuesday in meetings and discussions with the MSN Search team and Microsoft Research. Basically, a bunch of people way smarter than I am. 8O <br /><br />There's an <a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1663788,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594">eWeek article</a> about the event, but the actual guest list is still mostly shrouded in mystery. So far all the names I've seen are A-List bloggers...then there's me, Mr. Gadget Geek. :mrgreen: I'm not entirely sure what I can contribute beyond drilling the importance of having a great mobile-compatible search tool, but I've never been short on opinions, so I'm sure I'll come up with something. :lol: I'll be back in action on Wednesday morning, and largely offline until then.

[Filip Norrgard]

I suspect that I'm too late with this, but anyways....

Can you point out that the MSNbot might need some optimization as it hits my site (and others) quite often. In fact, if I sum the hits from the two different versions of MSNbot -- that have been visiting my site like crazy for the last two months -- then they are my number 1 visitor! 8O Not that I have got anything against MSNbot visiting, but I'm mostly concerned that it might start to turn up some bandwidth bills. ;)

Some sites that I found while Goo... erhm, searching were so affected that they were completely banning MSNbot in their robots.txt file. :? Some even claimed that the bot had downloaded gigabytes :!: of data from their sites before they banned it. IMO, that can't be good for either parties and especially MSN's image. :roll:

Finally, congrats Jason on the MSN Search Champ title! That will sound good on your CV, won't it? ;)