MSDN Search

If you have ever used MSDN, you would agree when I say that the #1 request, by a huge margin, from our customers is improved search.

The MSDN team at Microsoft has been working on improving search. Recently, the team launched a new MSDN Search Beta, integrating more relevant search from Microsoft and the community into one easy-to-use page. This beta rolls out site-wide soon. Please send us your feedback.

You will be able to search MSDN Forums with 10s of thousands of answered questions & an active community generating new answers every day. You can also find resources from Codezone within Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 by using Help…Search and clicking on the 'Codezone' tab! We have improved relevance for MSDN Online search results via leveraging implicit user feedback. MSDN now mines web logs and search logs to deduce the “best” MSDN links for a search query. Over the next few months, relevance (especially for common queries) should improve significantly as the system is populated with more data. Other improvements include the ability to switch back and forth between Microsoft and community results with one click without leaving the search page, simpler UI which aligns well with Visual Studio 2005's search UI and online integration into Visual Studio 2005. You can find resources from MSDN Forums within Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 by using Help…Search and clicking on the 'Questions' tab!

Many more features are on the way, including an MSN-based back-end, product/technology filtering, and much more. You will see MSDN search continuing to get better.

Namaste!