Windows Live Search snippets

Here's a few things relating to Search that caught our eye this week:

• SearchEngineLand has a detailed interview with Live Search's Justin Osmer. While there's only so many ways you can put a positive spin on poor share performance, Justin does pretty well.
  
  SEL: OK, to paraphrase that: Right now you're offering "just as good as" search experience and really the next stage is to look at differentiating yourself from the competition?
  
  Justin: Absolutely. We've nailed the fundamentals. We feel pretty confident, at this point, that we've done that. Now what we need to do is innovate on top of that, add those differentiators, and make our experience stands out and be unique from the competition. That's where our focus is now. It just took us two or three years to get to where we are now, which if you look at search history is relatively impressive. Building our own algorithmic engine, building our own ad platform, getting all this stuff up, we've made some tweaks to it over time. But now we feel that we're in a very good place for the side-by-side comparison. Now what we need to do is take it to that next level.
  
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• Nathan Weinberg describes some new spaces mashups going on around search. What was great to see was Rob Dolin jumping in and explaining the situation, as well as asking for user feedback. Take a look at his site www.testmash.com and give him your thoughts on how it compares to the existing Spaces search.
  
• The Live Search SOAP API has been updated, with again another call for user feedback, this time from non ASP/Java developers.