One of the new features released with the updated Live search was the use of Live macros. You can currently find 180+ macros at Microsoft Gadgets. The service originally launched during eTech and only predefined macros were allowed. Toward the end of March it was opened up so anybody could create Macros.

On April 7, Program Manager Zachary Gutt wrote:

This is our first beta release of Search Macros and we know there is a lot of room for improvement. We’re in the planning stages for the next round of enhancements right now and would love to hear any suggestions you have.

I was part of a group at Search Champs that was showed these macros and I liked the idea almost immediately. This is a user-friendly way of letting people subscribe to specialized and somewhat advanced search queries. It can’t be a bad thing trying to make it easier to search for and order information in a search engine. Instead of saying, hey, if you want to search my blog for posts made with a preference on certain items, you can just say use the following format in the live.com search window:

KEYWORD namespace.MACRONAME

How well does it work? Before publishing this post (it’s been in the can for a good month now) I intentionally waited for Microsoft to allow everybody to create custom Macros before writing about this in detail.

This means anybody reading this should be able to login to their .NET account, create their own namespace and start creating and (optionally) sharing macros in as little as a minute or two. The process is pretty easy but there are a couple important things to keep in mind.

Your namespace cannot be changed
First of all, the save button wasn’t working for me in Firefox 1.5, so might need to fire up Internet Explorer to create your own Macros. Take some time to think up what macro namespace you want to use because you’ll be stuck with. I chose “tdavid” as my namespace. The namespace will be used in every Macro you create.

The operator list is currently set at 25, so these macros can be fairly complex and involved.

Practical usage
Our VTOR group blog hosted on blogcharm service doesn’t come with a search engine. We have been using Google for the last few days but the results aren’t that good, so I created the following live.com macro:

tdavid.slvtor

The slvtor macro code looks like this:
(site:blogcharm.com/vtor/ && prefer:second+life)

Let’s say I want to find information on slurl in Second Life on our group blog, I’d use the following query:

slurl macro:tdavid.slvtor

Unfortunately, that doesn’t return the best results, this post would be the best result for that query. However, I must have bungled up the syntax in this Macro because a search on my slnews macro does a better job for the same query:

slurl macro:tdavid.slnews

Competing service Rollyo allows mixing the results of several sites into one search but as mentioned before is only as good as Yahoo’s results.

Others writing about Live search Macros
Fellow Search Champ Nathan over at Inside Microsoft has a detailed walkthru on how these Macros work, complete with images and descriptions.

The fact they only have 183 of these created, including the 30 or so they launched with from the Live Search team indicates this is getting off to a slow start. Have any readers created their own search macros yet? Any really good ones to share out of the list of 183+?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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