My favorite new technology I saw at Mix 06 was their Live Search platform. In particular, their Live Search Macros which will allow users to very easily create sophisticated targeted search results.

Live Search Macros is one of the smartest things Microsoft is doing in the Web 2.0 space. Today, with their search macro technology, users can easily create a vertical search results that both filters and ranks results. This will allow subject matter experts to define the sites, keywords, resources, links in/out and more to bring in a tailored search result.

The filtering and ranking parameters that can be placed in a macro are extensive and can be configured with sophisticated and/or combinations.

One of the more interesting modifiers is the ‘prefer’ modifier allowing a site to turn up more often or higher in the results. For example, placing the following modifier would make any results from web2.0central.com come up higher:

prefer:site:web2.0central.com

This could just as easily be used to prefer sites that have rss feeds:

prefer:hasfeed:

UPDATE: Live Search Documentation is now posted.

Currently use of the macros is limited to within the Live Search Toolbar. The groundbreaking piece is the forthcoming integration of the macros into the search API. This will allow anyone to create a vertical search engine to integrate within their website that can spin the results specifically to the authors desires.

Use of this macro search API will be freely available for non-commercial use. When getting clarification on commercial use, I was told that you can use it on a commercial website, as long as you’re not directly monetizing the results. Cool!

For those wanting to monetize the results and create their own search engine, currently they are only equipped to do this for major partners though there are plans to open this up broadly to the community.

Though this wasn’t expressed as their intention, the biggest opportunity I see is to allow anyone to create their own search engine embedded into their website or service and monetized by Microsoft’s new Ad Center service with a revenue share model. This would not only further the adoption of Live Search but also their Ad Center service. For those that don’t want to monetize with Ad Center, then a more conventional per search licensing fee could be followed and the user could results however they want.

You can get more macros on the Microsoft Gadgets site and within the week they should be launching a web based tool to make it easy for anyone to create their own search macros.

Technorati Tags: api, live, livesearch, macro, macros, mashup, microsoft, mix06, search, web 2.0, web2.0, web20