MSN Search Web Service SDK Version 0.60 Now Available

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

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Lead Program Manager

MSN Search

mp2005 wrote:

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

EytanSeidman at 2007-9-8 >