[Webcast] Questions on the Live Search

I received a couple of good questions from Ian after the webcast Tuesday that I think are relevent to the entire community. Here you go:

1. What, if any, software is required (a) on the client (i.e. browsing) computer, and (b) on the hosting computer, in order to use Live Search. Can it be used by an Apple client computer? Can it be used on a Unix-based host?

a. Client – for Live.com we’ve made an effort to be as cross browser compatible as possible. There are only two exceptions that I know of, i) Virtual Earth 3D requires IE for an activeX control, and ii) the Live Search Box works on IE and Firefox, but not opera or safari.

b. Server – from the server side, if you are building an application on our Live Search SOAP API, or using the Live Search Box, you should be able to use these from almost any web development technology. E.g. PERL, PHP, ASP.Net, Apache, IIS, Linux, Windows, etc.

2. How does Live Search determine the latitude and longitude to assign to a web-site (or web-page) when you use the location option. Is there any way that a web-site or web-page can specify these explicitly?

This is actually a tough problem. There isn't any way for a site to explicitly provide a location for a page, although we have discussed adding such a meta tag at some point. Currently we set the lat/long by recognizing references to locations within the page text itself - so something like "Seattle, WA" or "98052" would be detected as a location reference, and converted to a lat/long.

Thanks to those who participated and to Ian for sending these great questions.