The Live Search team has been working hard to improve the Product Search Beta and Product Upload Beta sites based on the customer and merchant feedback that we have collected over the past few months.  Here are the changes that we have just released.

Product Search Beta Changes

Check out the improved experience by visiting the Product Search Beta site.  Note that if you go to Product Search via the “More” links in web search results, you may not see these improvements for a few days as the changes are being rolled out incrementally to all Live Search users over the next two weeks.

• Major performance improvements: We’ve improved the speed of the site by decreasing page load time for Product Search results significantly.  Pages load several seconds faster on average.  Keep in mind that this is based on testing in Redmond and that actual page load times may vary depending on where you live.

• UI improvements: We have improved UI usability based on customer feedback and usage statistics.  Refinements are now drop down menus that load quickly, the number of results on each page is customizable based on user preference, and sample searches have been added to the home page to help new users get started with the site.  We’ve also made feedback links more prominent on the site so that we can collect even more user feedback.
• Bug fixes: The team has fixed several bugs especially around state management.  This means that unexpected site behavior has been corrected in cases where users click the back button, undo refinements, or navigate back and forth between different product search results.

Here’s a screenshot of the new refinements UI:

Product Upload Beta Changes

We had an incredible response from merchants since the program launched back in November 2006 and have now published more than 5 million offers from merchants into Live Product Search Beta!  We have collected feedback from merchants and updated the Product Upload Beta site with the following changes.

• Google Base Feed Support: Merchants can now upload feeds using the Google Base feed format
• RSS: Merchants can subscribe to an RSS feed to receive regular updates on the status of their uploaded catalogs
• Improved Bulk Upload: We’ve made numerous improvements to make the FTP bulk upload process faster and enabled secure FTP
• UI Improvements: We’ve updated the user experience with usability improvements based on merchant feedback including a new home page and upload page.

Please take some time to give us additional feedback on the sites and keep the feature suggestions coming!!

Ling Bao, Phanindra Kanumuri, and Jonathan Hsu, Product Search team et. all.
Live Search team