MS content vs other content??
- Historically MSDN has been a site that is scoped primarily to publish code, documentation, and other developer content for customers. As we shift to our community platform and implement features such as social bookmarking, developer will be able to bookmark not only MS generated content but also anything on the internet. We hope this will be used to bring access to non-MS generated content on MSDN.
Do you think that is valuable?
Would you use bookmarking for that purpose?
-Dan
Dan Truax- ModificatoDanTrMSFTgiovedì 8 maggio 2008 18.28text change in title
Tutte le risposte
Hi Dan,
Linking External content on MSDN will be of great help. It will also make developers less dependant of quality of search engine results.
Thanks,
Vikas
.NET with me @ http://www.vikasgoyal.net & http://dotnetwithme.blogspot.com- Great feedback. Thanks. Question on search now that you bring it up. When you are looking for developer content on the MS platform do you primary start with a search engine or do you go to MSDN and start from there?
Have you used MSDN search? What is your opinion of our search for that content compared to starting with Live or google or yahoo?
Dan Truax - Hi Dan,
I was about to write further on search.
Personally i always start from search believing that search results will give me best content on top across internet which may not be true always.
So, our aim with new MSDN should be that we start from MSDN, and MSDN should provide me enough relevant links pointing to external content. Now the method of link submission and review can be more like www.dzone.com where links gets promoted based on community review and votes.
Hope i make sense here.
vikas
www.VikasGoyal.net
.NET with me @ http://www.vikasgoyal.net & http://dotnetwithme.blogspot.com - How do you mean "bookmark"? I keep shortcuts to internet content in the folders with the related projects.
- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______
MS Excel MVP - Re Search:
I typically go to Google and search for my keywords. Google returns results from inside and outside Microsoft. I have been frustrated with MSDN search, which I have admittedly not relied upon for a long while. I would know the title of the article, enter it into the MSDN search field, and come up dry. Entering the same into Google would find it instantly.
- Jon
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Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______
MS Excel MVP - Great feedback on search. Jon - you should try our search again. We have made a lot of investment in search optimation, scoping and refinement. I would be interested in your feedback if we are better now.
For bookmarks I mean social bookmarking like you would see on http://del.icio.us/ - which is a popular site for that. It gives you the ability to create and save bookmarks across multiple machines. for MSDN we want to do this to not only allow that but to be able to themn use the bookmarks to show customers what other customers are finding useful for developer content on MSDN and the internet. Hence it allows us to include content within MSDN that is not MS authored.
Make sense?
Dan Truax - Personally I always return back to Google Search (I do however think the Google Search did -not- improve over time, it used to give better results) when looking for information. The reason for that is that I am searching 'issue-centric'.
The reason why you are looking for an article or forum entry is based on the fact that you have an issue. Chances are that with xx billion other people having the same issue there are always a couple of them who entered something on the internet. Google Search is right now the one capable in tracking these issues. These entries are most likely to the point and serving a solution as well.
That's for searching. For bookmarking, I always have difficulties to do the administration for favorites, bookmarks, delicious or other sites and end up with huge piles of bookmarks never knowing what is useful when I return to them. I like Jon's option to save bookmarks of favs close to the project.
What I liked a lot was the thing Alan Griver (the Foxpro guy) showed at the MVP Summit in 2007 concerning TagSpace where it was possible to add tags but more important the system was capable in linking syntactical information the right way. (I.e. when you tag something as Kiss [the Media player] you don't want to end up with all sorts of adult information...)
Overall, for me the most important thing is to present me a solution for the issue that I have. And I'm sure there is more information on my issue on the complete internet rather than in MS content. So the answer for me would be show me the results covering the complete internet 'knowledge base'.
I'm not sure I make any sense ... but just ask if you want to deep dive on certain topics :-)
Software Engineer * MVP-Visual Developer-VSTO - DanTr said:
Have you used MSDN search? What is your opinion of our search for that content compared to starting with Live or google or yahoo?
Dan, where do you want feedback on MSDN Search? I've got some. ;-)
John Saunders - Hi,
I recently did a small analysis between MSDN Search and Google for Microsoft content. MSDN Search has definitely improved a lot.
Here is my analysis - http://dotnetwithme.blogspot.com/2008/05/msdn-search-30-have-you-tried-it.html
http://DotNetWithMe.blogspot.com
vikas goyal
.NET with me @ http://www.vikasgoyal.net & http://dotnetwithme.blogspot.com - John Saunders said:DanTr said:
Have you used MSDN search? What is your opinion of our search for that content compared to starting with Live or google or yahoo?
Dan, where do you want feedback on MSDN Search? I've got some. ;-)
John Saunders
Hi John. I would love it if you posted here so that everyone can see and add/discuss. Otherwise you can also always email me at dantr@microsoft.com.
Dan Truax - VikasGoyal said:
Hi,
I recently did a small analysis between MSDN Search and Google for Microsoft content. MSDN Search has definitely improved a lot.
Here is my analysis - http://dotnetwithme.blogspot.com/2008/05/msdn-search-30-have-you-tried-it.html
http://dotnetwithme.blogspot.com/
vikas goyal
.NET with me @ http://www.vikasgoyal.net & http://dotnetwithme.blogspot.com
This is excellent Vikas!
Dan Truax - Actually I'm also with Google Search to search the MSDN forums and MSDN documentation in general. You know "msdn2 <enter_your_.NET_class_here>" in google works great... I hope that in the future the search will improve greatly. Perhaps there should be a search that returns just the classes of the .NET framework if you search for them... like the "msdn2" keyword in google does.
Microsoft Student Partner -- If my post solved the problem, please mark it as answer. Thank you. - DanTr said:
Great feedback. Thanks. Question on search now that you bring it up. When you are looking for developer content on the MS platform do you primary start with a search engine or do you go to MSDN and start from there?
Have you used MSDN search? What is your opinion of our search for that content compared to starting with Live or google or yahoo?
Dan Truax
Traditionally MSDN search has been simply horrible. There have been so many times that I have searched on an exact article title and received a huge number of irrelevant results, and then searched with a few keywords (or the title, either way) on Google and received exactly what I was looking for, that I gave up on using MSDN search. It has been a year or more since I last used it, but after past experiences and current success with Google, I have not seen any reason to try it again.
Matthew Roche, MCT, MCSD, MCDBA, MCITP, MCSE, MCAD, MCSA, MCPD, MCTS, OCP, etc. - Christian Liensberger said:
Actually I'm also with Google Search to search the MSDN forums and MSDN documentation in general. You know "msdn2 <enter_your_.NET_class_here>" in google works great... I hope that in the future the search will improve greatly. Perhaps there should be a search that returns just the classes of the .NET framework if you search for them... like the "msdn2" keyword in google does.
Hi Christian - My name is Justin and I work on MSDN search. Would you mind if I bothered you for some more information? Our approach for improiving search is highly reliant on finding specific problematic searches and then fixing whatever underlying problems cause those searches to perform poorly. Anyway, are there specific MSDN searches you find particularly problematic today (especially ones where Google or other search engines do better)? If you can help us identify your problematic searches, I can help get them fixed for you. If you try both MSDN Search and Google and it turns out they're comparable, that's good info to hear about too. :-) Let us know either way.
BTW, if you want an easy way to get .NET classes, here's two ways to do this easily:
- just type the fully-qualified class name as a URL into your browser, e.g. msdn.com/System.Net.WebClient
- type the class name into MSDN Search, and choose the ".NET Framework Class Library" refinement link which should be one of the first few "refine by topic" links underneath the search box.
One annoying thing you'll notice in these results is that all the different versions of a document (in this case the WebClient class) show up without a clear indication of which result corresponds to what version. We're working on this problem for a future search release-- clearer product & version info on search results is near the top of our list of things to work on next.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to send us feedback!
Justin Grant [MSDN and TechNet] Christian Liensberger said:
BTW, if you want an easy way to get .NET classes, here's two ways to do this easily:
- just type the fully-qualified class name as a URL into your browser, e.g. msdn.com/System.Net.WebClient
- type the class name into MSDN Search, and choose the ".NET Framework Class Library" refinement link which should be one of the first few "refine by topic" links underneath the search box.
Be careful not to confuse 'searching' with 'finding'. In your examples you 'know' where to look and by knowing narrowing down the search results to get to the documentation that you basically wanted to find by searching. (Hmm this sounds quite confusing...)
I think there is the essential difference and a trap in itself. It's easy to solve a puzzle once you know the outcome. It's difficult to provide the right search results if you don't really know what the user is searching for by just looking at the words. Is searching on "auto" resulting in links to automobiles the right thing, or did he want to get things in the "auto"-matic/-mation context?
I'm happy not to be in your shoes as this is an extreme difficult thing to solve. It's interesting though.
-= Maarten =-
Software Engineer * MVP-Visual Developer-VSTOYou're exactly right, Maarten-- the case of looking up .NET classes is a particularly easy search problem to solve, as long as we can help users figure out which of the 20 different "MessageBox" APIs correspond to the product/technology you're using. We even have a different term we use to talk about this kind of search: a "lookup" like a lookup in a dictionary, where you know exactly what you're looking for ahead of time.
On the other hand, searches trying to answer How-To or Troubleshooting problems where you don't know the answer are generally much harder. You correctly observed that often it's hard to know the right specific search queries to choose, so users end up with general queries which match too many results. In cases like that, often the best thing we can do for users in search is to help them find more precise queries.
One thing we're trying to help out with query precision is autocomplete. We just released an update to autocomplete (see my blog post) which increased the # of autocomplete terms by 80x, to 2.4 million terms. So now when you start typing in MSDN or TechNet search, you'll get a lot of help to find a more precise term.
For example, in your "auto" example there are literally hundreds or even thousands of different queries. With autocomplete, we show you the most common matches on top for whatever you've typed so far, and as you type more we give you more precise suggestions. Kinda like Visual Studio's Index tool window, but ranked by relevance not alphabetically and matching inside multi-word queries not just StartsWith. Let us know if you find this useful or how we can improve. Note that the improved autocomplete is only on the search results page so far-- we're working on rolling it out sitewide soon.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback-- and don't hesitate to report any problematic queries you find. Thanks!
Justin Grant [MSDN and TechNet]- Hi Dan,
I've done a lot thinking about the social bookmark idea along with the larger page layout(3 Web pages side-by-side) and realized that although I could through search integrate any content within my three pages wide layout there was a concern about what if a Web site does not want its content at my Web site? This also brought about the idea that I might be dealing with, in a sense, indirectly, content theft. So I started looking at social bookmarking the other way around. In other words, Web site's who want to be presented under the MSDN banner are the people who should sign up, listing themselves under a keyword or several keyword search, monitored by MSDN to make sure the content and keyword make sense, and that they would be the people to ask.
I have no idea if the Web would follow the direction above but with the social bookmark idea, you could have both private and public, where the option of private bookmarks can be checked based on the pubic list of sites or people who sign up or want to particpate under the search and public Microsoft banner, including statistics at private bookmarks or search result pages about an url, on the number of times the url has been referenced.
As mentioned at other forums, I've been researching the social Web based on a 3 side-by-side full size page layout. I'm rushing the idea a little but I posted a simple version of some the work I've been doing with 3 pages sid-by-side to present the effect of optional wide page might have at my www.noddex.net site. (press arrow right and first HTML title at the menu to open the wider page.) The idea is open to anyone who can take it the next step further, but again I contend that if Microsoft were to put the larger page layout at their Web sites, they would change the Web. The opening topic at the site is: Can there be social Web if everybody is the same page? A retorical question in a sense based on the larger page but not when you start adding 3 full page layout and link options to many pages within one larger Web page, it's a different experience altogether.
Regards,
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- Enabling external content is a great idea. It's always a great idea.
Naturally, there need to be some protection mechanisms to prevent vandalism - not sure how you balance the needs of the dev against the need to stop the vandals/spammers/etc. You also need to deal with relevancy - pointing to my facebook page for example may not be relevant to answering a .NET framework question!
Also, to some degree, we can do this today - the Wiki function in the MSDN library allows the community to post links and other information. And likewise, I can post links here too (e.g. http://www.microsoft.com.).
What sorts of linking were you thinking about? And what, if any, protection mechanisms are you considering?
- justingrant said:Interestingly, in this area, I've found LS better than Google. For example, searching for system.datetime class
You're exactly right, Maarten-- the case of looking up .NET classes is a particularly easy search problem to solve, as long as we can help users figure out which of the 20 different "MessageBox" APIs correspond to the product/technology you're using. We even have a different term we use to talk about this kind of search: a "lookup" like a lookup in a dictionary, where you know exactly what you're looking for ahead of time.
Google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=msdn+system.datetime&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
LS: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=msdn+system.datetime&sourceid=Mozilla-search&form=CHROME
In this example, LS brings up the class I want, while Google doesn't. This may be an anomaly but I've seen it a bit recently. - DanTr said:What conclusions have you come to? Are you planning on more or less?
Historically MSDN has been a site that is scoped primarily to publish code, documentation, and other developer content for customers. As we shift to our community platform and implement features such as social bookmarking, developer will be able to bookmark not only MS generated content but also anything on the internet. We hope this will be used to bring access to non-MS generated content on MSDN.
Do you think that is valuable?
Would you use bookmarking for that purpose?
Thomas Lee - Dan, I'm having bad luck here. First, it seems I never replied until now. Second, my original reply caused IE7 to crash. I'll try once more.
I hear the following story too often. A developer goes to MSDN Enhanced Search,and types "web service security" (without the quotes).
At least 24 of the first 49 matches are about the obsolete WSE 3.0 and WSE 2.0! What do you think the developer is going to do? He's going to decide that WSE is the way that Microsoft wants him to do web service security, since "MSDN says so".
The MSDN Library and the other sources for Enhanced Search contain information, documentation, blogs, etc., from the past decade, at least. I was easily able to find articles from 1998. That's a wonderful resource - for a historian. I don't think historians are the primary audience for this content. I think the defaults for search should be aimed at someone who has a development problem or question today.
Also, most developers don't actually need to see articles on the DateTime Structure from four .NET versions, plus the new article on the SilverLight version. And the sort order of the results should include the current one first, if you must include more than one version in any case. The individual articles have a sidebar leading to the other versions, so I don't see any reason for multiple versions to show up in the results.
That's it for the moment. I want to click "submit" before IE crashes on me again.
John Saunders | Use File->New Project to create Web Service Projects - Hi John - thanks very much for your feedback. Yes, we need to do much better making it more clear which search results correspond to which technology (and which version of that technology)! Since our page titles and URLs don't always make it obvious which version you're looking at, the Search UI needs to pick up the slack.
We have relief coming. The most useful feature of our next release is a pretty simple change: we're going to label each search result with matching refinements for that result. For example, a search result from the Visual Studio 2008 documentation or Forums will be labelled "Visual Studio 2008". This won't be perfect in the first release since not all parts of Library and Forums will be labelled with enough granularity, and many content types (e.g. blogs) aren't categorized with enough metadata to make labelling possible. But it's a start, and its accuracy will improve over time. Does this sound useful?
You have an interesting idea about hiding results for older versions of the exact same API documentation. That said, for every user who wants to see only the latest, there's another who wants to see a particular older version. Satisfying everyone with a default (particularly soon after a new version ships) is really hard. So initially we're probably going to try clearer labelling by results version, and then see what kind of feedback we continue to get.
One idea I really like is an "API Instant Answer" feature, where instead of a spelling suggestion (e.g. "Did you mean: MessageBoxEx") we could list the name of the API and then list all the different products and versions where that API can be found, e.g. "Did you mean MessageBox for Win32? .NET 2.0? .NET 3.5? FoxPro? BizTalk?" This is a hard problem due to the editorial work required to make this accurate and globalized, but this kind of thing is definitely where we want to go long-term. Does this sound like something you'd find useful?
Again, thanks for the feedback and please let us know if you have more suggestions or concerns.
I will ask other folks on our team to look into the browser-crashing issues you're reporting.
Justin Grant [MSDN and TechNet] Justin, thanks for responding. I don't know why I didn't notice your response sooner.
The feature you discuss for your next release sounds interesting. If you want a beta tester, let me know!
As to API version, note that, by showing the latest, you won't be disenfranchising the developer who needs an older version: all versions have a sidebar on the first page that provides access to all of the other versions. You would be adding only a single click for other developers. Also, let's be honest and say that there is very little change between the versions, in most cases. I would think you could have used a single-document format, with some sort of markup to show which sections are different. It would even be more useful, in fact, to be able to look at a particular API, and see what changed between releases, or to see that nothing has changed between releases.
I'd also like you to consider a deeper issue. There are multiple use cases for developers searching the Library. For instance, a particular developer is likely to be in the same job, at least for the next year or so. That means, for instance, he's unlikely to change from someone looking for the latest information to someone looking for information on WSE 3.0 or the SOAP Toolkit (both obsolete). You should have a "My Search Profile" area to capture this information.
I'm no expert in Information Design, but you might start with high level things like, "I'm a developer looking for the latest information", vs. "I'm mostly interested in technologies based on the (.NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5) Platform". You could get down to the level of, "I only want to see content in <list of languages>", or "I never want to see content about <list of technologies>".
Of course, it should be possible to change these restrictions during a search, as is currently done for refinements. In terms of the search engine, I'd suggest starting off by using these only to filter results, not to drive the search. If it became useful and practical, then maybe some of the restrictions could drive the actual search process.I suppose that, eventually, a profile like this could be used to steer content towards particular developers, instead of simply being a passive filter.
I have to tell you that, the more I think about it, the more I worry about people starting new development using obsolete (pardon, deprecated) technologies. There's a group of developers (and managers) out there who believe that whatever they see on a Microsoft site is the Truth, so we've got to help them find it.
John Saunders | Use File->New Project to create Web Service Projects- John Saunders said:
Dan, I'm having bad luck here. First, it seems I never replied until now. Second, my original reply caused IE7 to crash. I'll try once more.
I hear the following story too often. A developer goes to MSDN Enhanced Search,and types "web service security" (without the quotes).
At least 24 of the first 49 matches are about the obsolete WSE 3.0 and WSE 2.0! What do you think the developer is going to do? He's going to decide that WSE is the way that Microsoft wants him to do web service security, since "MSDN says so".
The MSDN Library and the other sources for Enhanced Search contain information, documentation, blogs, etc., from the past decade, at least. I was easily able to find articles from 1998. That's a wonderful resource - for a historian. I don't think historians are the primary audience for this content. I think the defaults for search should be aimed at someone who has a development problem or question today.
Also, most developers don't actually need to see articles on the DateTime Structure from four .NET versions, plus the new article on the SilverLight version. And the sort order of the results should include the current one first, if you must include more than one version in any case. The individual articles have a sidebar leading to the other versions, so I don't see any reason for multiple versions to show up in the results.
That's it for the moment. I want to click "submit" before IE crashes on me again.
John Saunders | Use File->New Project to create Web Service Projects
Hi John!
If this is the John Saunders I have worked with on previous Forums 2.x issues, hello again :) If it's not the same John, welcome to Forums!
I'd definitely like to know a little more info about the crashing experience you are having with forums and IE 7 so my test team can investigate this. Can you provide me with the following:
What are the steps to repro this issue?
What Operating System and exact browser version of IE 7 are you using?
How often does this happen to you?
In what forum does this happen when posting? All?
Thanks for the continued support and feedback. Hope things are going well for you!
Alicia
Program Manager, Server and Tools Online Engineering Live Services Team - Hi, Alicia, yes, it's me.
The IE7 thing only happened once. It had something to do with using the reply editor (as I am now). I seem to remember that I was using one of the pop-up windows; perhaps the Hyperlink editor, possibly the Code editor. I was posting to this forum, using XP SP2, IE7.0.5730.13.
I really wouldn't worry about it unless you've received similar reports. If I see any sort of pattern, I'll let you know. If if happens again, I'll try to attach the debugger and get you a dump of IE.
Later,
John
John Saunders | Use File->New Project to create Web Service Projects - Here's another. Try this search: http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/?query=AddOnPreRenderCompleteAsync%20databind&locale=en-us&ac=3.
Most of the results are hits on the table of contents. Not good.
John Saunders | Use File->New Project to create Web Service Projects - Hi John - you're right, searching for AddOnPreRenderComplete databind will bring back all methods in the Page class as results, because, when library pages are exposes to search engines, the HTML includes links for all parents and siblings of the current page.
For example, look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.page.databind(robot).aspx - this is what a search engine sees when indexing.
I'll talk with the folks who own the search-engine-friendly HTML rendering for the MSDN Library and ask them why we show links to TOC siblings. There may be a good reason for this related to optimizing search relevance or crawlability-- if I get an answer I'll post back here.
Justin Grant [MSDN and TechNet] Thanks for looking into this, Justin.
While you're at it, ask them why I want to see all the other members of the Page class. Maybe a search engine wants to see that, but I do not.Someone looking for all the members of the Page class can enter "Page class".
John Saunders | Use File->New Project to create Web Service Projects- Thomas Lee said:DanTr said:What conclusions have you come to? Are you planning on more or less?
Historically MSDN has been a site that is scoped primarily to publish code, documentation, and other developer content for customers. As we shift to our community platform and implement features such as social bookmarking, developer will be able to bookmark not only MS generated content but also anything on the internet. We hope this will be used to bring access to non-MS generated content on MSDN.
Do you think that is valuable?
Would you use bookmarking for that purpose?
Thomas Lee
A few moths later and the same question - what conclusions have you come to?
Thomas Lee
