This coming Thursday, I've been invited to present to the Live Search team over in Redmond. We'll be discussing all sorts of issues, including spam on Live, increasing retention rates for searchers and growing relationships between Live and webmasters. However, I can't represent the entire search community on my own, so I'm hoping to solicit your input. What would you like to see Live do to make it easier to interface with their search engine from a webmaster perspective, and as a user?

Some of the things I'm intending to discuss include:

• Tools & information that Live could provide to webmasters & SEOs
• Some specific examples of where Live seems to be struggling against manipulative link building techniques
• Signals that might help to establish trust between sites and Live
• Opportunities for establishing and benefiting from greater community involvement in the SEO/M world
• Advantages & disadvantages of including vertical & specialized results
• The visual interface of Live's result pages
• The Live vs. MSN branding decision

As I look at Live's results, I see a lot of opportunity for improvement. It's my sincere belief that interfacing actively with people inside the search community will help to get the Live engineers exposure to a great number of issues at the engine. Just running through a few searches, I found some material that might be of interest to their search quality team:

• Weddings near Ashland, OR - it appears that Live isn't recognizing the "OR" as referring to Oregon, as most of the results center around Ashland, Wisconsin
• Popurls - oddly, the PopURLs website doesn't appear on the first page for its own name
• Yahoo Answers - a strange broken out result is #2, and a similar pattern also exists for searches like New York Times (note the strangely high placement of the Migrant Camp Laborers article).
• WSJ - the page is right, but the title and description are bizarre - "interstitial page?"
• House Values - It looks like Live doesn't interpret "house" and "home" as meaning the same thing. This means that Zillow doesn't have their usual rule of the SERPs - they're not even in the top 100.
• John McCain - The first two pages are the same result

Obviously, I'm going out of my way to point out foibles, and among the few dozen searches I ran tonight, there were plenty where Live did a fine job. However, I don't think they'd get much value out of me patting them on the back, so we'll focus on those issues where they're struggling. However, if you do have a positive comment or something they're doing that you like, I'll bet they'd love to hear it.

Thanks so much for your help. Please constribute by posting your thoughts, concerns & issues below. I can promise that they'll get in front of the people behind Live.com - a very rare opportunity.

BTW - As I mentioned to Nathan (a senior PM at Live) on the phone today; I must say that it's fun working with Microsoft on a project where they're the underdog - there's a great depth of resources to pull from and an incredibly tough challenge ahead. And, for those who are concerned, this is a pro bono gig, like the presentation I gave to Google, so there should be no conflict of interest - we're all trying to make search a better place to be for SEOs, businesses, search engines and users.

I'm also embedding a Sphinn link (which I need to start doing more often, I think):