The Custom Search team has had a busy 2009. This is the year we turned 3. And now Custom Search is powering many tens of millions of queries a day on millions of small and large websites. We believe that search should be easy to deploy on your website, and, in addition to providing great relevance, should be flexible, customizable and feature-rich. With the help of your suggestions, we hope we are delivering on these goals. This year, we hit many milestones. Here are some of the key developments: - integration with several hosters to bring Custom Search to your doorstep
- enabled support for rich snippets, giving you more control over presentation of results
- it's now easier for you to promote specific content to the top of your search results
- we deployed contextual search within Blogger, Google Sites and Wikipedia
- automatic transliteration is now integrated into the search box
- improved results rendering flexibility with the Custom Search Element
- plug-n-play with themes for enhanced customizability of results look and feel
- added support for structured metadata and the ability to restrict results by specific attributes
- we got you ready for the growing population of users searching your websites with mobile devices, such as Android phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, etc.
And there's so much more to do with Custom Search. We'll be working next year to give you additional metadata support, more results customization, and search features that will make it even easier for your users to find the right information faster on your websites. Your users will be happier and you can focus on more important things. As always, we're looking at your feedback to guide our efforts. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Meanwhile, happy holidays, and we'll see you soon ... in the next decade! Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee for the Custom Search Team
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Ok, pop-quiz time. Below, you will find two screenshots I took from two different applications: [ Screenshot 1 ] [ Screenshot 2 ] Can you tell what is different between those two images? If you said that the button in the second image seems a few pixels...( read more)
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Hi everyone, When using Expression Blend, a common task you probably engage in is working with layout. Tasks I commonly associate with “working with layout” involve moving things around, rearranging the order of elements, ensuring everything flows when...( read more)
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One of the goals of Silverlight’s Visual State Manager technology is to let you do quite a bit of control customization without needing to use Blend’s Timeline, nor even having to know what a Storyboard is! Feel free to test-drive the Silverlight Button...( read more)
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IDC Content >>
IDC's coverage of content services, networks, rights and management.
 Source:This IDC study presents five unique case studies of how organizations have developed corporate social media guidelines for employees to follow. The study features the processes taken by ESPN, HP, Intel, Mayo Clinic, and SAP to support appropriate use of social media among employees and how the interests of the
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As you probably know, Silverlight and WPF have a runtime piece called the Visual State Manager (or VSM for short). As I’ll describe in this post, VSM and the Expression Blend tooling support for VSM lend a nice clean mental model to the business of visual...( read more)
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We’ve published eleven new articles on the blog and they all contain information and tips that you’ll find useful when styling common Silverlight 3 controls. First there’s an article with some general tips: it discusses template binding, different ways...( read more)
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The changing landscape of intellectual property threatens to become a major industry disruption. These cool vendors have found inventive ways for organizations to deal with the complexities and risks associated with the growth in patents and open-source software.
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The following was presented at IDC Directions in March 2009.
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Having made a successful transition from a point product to integrated suite, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, with its content and collaboration features, is experiencing widespread adoption. However, regional use differs for enterprise and departmental implementations.
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The following was presented at IDC Directions in March 2009.
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Understand the "big picture" of the Azure Services Platform components and how they can be used by applications running in the cloud and on local systems.
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In partnership with the Google Chrome Frame team, we are making available a library to allow your web application to detect the presence of Google Chrome Frame. We on the Ajax team are excited about the possibilities of this add-on improving JavaScript performance and enabling some of the new features available in HTML5. If you have a web application which makes use of these new features, you can use this library to prompt the user to install Google Chrome Frame, or recognize when a user has just installed it. The library provides granular controls so that you can create the user experience which best suits your site. As a short example, I've created the following simple demo which just detects whether Google Chrome Frame is installed or not with an alternate message if you are in a browser for which this plugin is not available. Do you have Google Chrome Frame installed? We're checking on that now. Ben Lisbakken has also added detection for Google Chrome Frame to the Ajax Playground. If you view source on the page you can see another example of a customized CFInstall.check implementation which is designed to fit the page. For more details on the Google Chrome Frame Ajax API, see the documentation and for questions, please visit the discussion group.
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We enjoy featuring real-world applications that show how versatile the AJAX APIs can be. Below we're highlighting two very different apps and the developers who built them: AroundMeAroundMe is an iPhone application where the AJAX APIs are central to the user experience. Specifically, the app utilizes the Local Search API to enable users to find information about their surroundings. In the videos below, Marco Pifferi (the developer behind AroundMe) gives a demo of his app, his thoughts on using the AJAX APIs, and tips for integrating them in mobile apps. MibbitMibbit is a web-based chat application that uses the AJAX APIs to enhance the chat experience. The language APIs help users to translate their messages into a number of different languages. Mibbit also uses the Maps API and YouTube API to display embedded maps or YouTube videos if a user includes a Maps or YouTube URL in their chat. Jimmy Moore, creator of Mibbit, walks through Mibbit in his video below. Do you have a great app that uses the AJAX APIs? Submit a video about it and we may feature it on this blog. Questions? Stop by our support forum or IRC channel.
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Cloud computing is characterized by a number of key attributes that influence how cloud computing services are built, delivered and consumed. These attributes distinguish cloud computing services from other forms of off-premises services.
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The following was presented at the IDC Directions conferences in Boston and San Jose in March 2009.
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Enterprise architecture tools help to assemble, integrate, analyze and present information related to enterprise architecture. We summarize research that analyzes aspects of these tools and related products.
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Very few business strategies today can be successfully executed without information technology (IT) to support them. In fact, market leaders acknowledge that IT is not really so much a separate function within their companies, as it is an integral and strategic part of their operating infrastructure. Yet, with traditional IT systems requiring large capital outlays and technical staffs, and taking too much time to implement and change, many businesses - large and small alike - have been severely...
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The economic recession, which has gathered pace in the wake of the financial crisis, continues to depress IT spending levels and expectations. Organizations across the globe have been forced to implement cutbacks in all areas of their business spending, and technology investment has not escaped this general phase of cost control and consolidation. Overall declines are now expected in many sectors of the IT market during 2009, especially those related to capital spending on hardware upgrades and...
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