People spend the bulk of their time online doing two things: checking their email and searching the web. We thought we’d bring the two together, so you can use search to act on the ideas and tasks piling up in your inbox.

Today, we’re excited to begin testing a new feature we’re calling Active Search for Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta with a small group of beta participants in the US.

Active Search bridges the gap between your inbox and the broader web using the power of search. Using Active Search is essentially the same as conducting a ton of related searches the old fashioned way – by cutting and pasting terms from your email into a separate web browser – only without all the effort.

Here’s a snapshot of Active Search in action:

Flowers for mom and other neat tricks

Much of what you need to get done online – from planning your next vacation to remembering to buy flowers for your mom on her birthday – is piling up in your inbox, just waiting for you to take action, usually by looking something up on the web.

With this in mind, we’ve designed Active Search to make it easier for you to act on anything that piques your interest while reading your email. That’s why we show you key search terms we find in a message and provide a search box right underneath, so you can quickly search for terms of your own.

We also show search results and sponsored links right inline, so you can see what’s related to your message on the web, without having to open a new browser window. Of course, if you come across something really interesting, just click More results… and we’ll open a new window with a full set of search results for you to dive into.

Because we only look for relevant keywords in the current email message or RSS article you happen to be viewing in your inbox, there are times when we just can’t find anything relevant enough to show you. So we don’t – we just show a search box ready for you to enter search terms you happen to come up with while reading the message.

You’re completely in charge

We believe strongly that users should be in control of their email experience (actually their entire online experience). We felt it was really important that you have the choice and be able to decide for yourself if you find Active Search relevant and useful.

While we hope you find this new feature helpful, we’d rather you decide for yourself. To help you make that choice, when you first start Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta you’ll notice a new email in your inbox that explains how Active Search works and makes clear how you can switch Active Search off or on at anytime.

Don’t like it? Just click on the arrow at the top of the pane. We immediately turn off Active Search and give you the display ad you have today in Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta.  Here’s what it looks like:

For your eyes only

While Active Search provides a deeply personalized experience, we know how important your privacy is to you, so we’ve worked hard to ensure comply with Microsoft's Online Privacy Statement which reflects our commitment to ensuring that consumers have the ability to control the collection, use and disclosure of their personal information.

No one, besides you, will see the search terms, sponsored links and search results shown in Active Search because

• we rely on computers, not humans, to look for relevant keywords in your email messages and RSS article
• we will never trace any keywords we may collect while getting results from our search and advertising services back to the person from whose email they were drawn
• we remove any trace of keywords we may collect while getting results from our search and advertising services from your PC every time you clear your Internet Explorer Temporary Internet Files cache or restart Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta
• we never share email content (including email addresses) or personally identifiable information from Active Search with advertisers or third parties without your prior permission.

Also, it’s important to know that Active Search:

• never looks for keywords at all if you’ve switched Active Search off – really, off means off
• never looks for keywords in files attached to your email messages
• only looks for keywords in email messages and RSS articles marked as “safe” by our Junk Email Filter
• avoids looking for sensitive data like credit card numbers or social security numbers that may pop up in your mail from time to time and for which search results would be of little use.

If you want verification of the way we’re doing things, you don’t have to just listen to us. To help provide an extra level of assurance that we’re meeting the bar we set for ourselves in terms of helping protect your privacy, we have worked with Jefferson Wells, an external consulting company, to conduct a full privacy audit of our Active Search for Windows Live Mail Desktop client component. The results were great and you can find their report on their website.

Better Than a Superbowl Ad

Active Search provides advertisers with a powerful way to reach consumers with text advertising that is very relevant to their daily lives. Contextually targeted sponsored links are shown automatically for the relevant keywords Active Search finds as users read their email; these will be provided by Kanoodle during our beta. Paid search sponsored links are shown whenever users select alternative keywords or enter in their own search terms; these are delivered by Microsoft adCenter.

Let us know what you think

Like other new features in Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta, we’re deploying Active Search to a smaller group of beta participants in the US, randomly selected to test drive the feature.

Being able to compare feedback from participants with and without Active Search will help us learn whether our new features are truly of value to our users. Also, starting with a small group of testers will help us fine tune Active Search for a broader audience when we finally release.

If you’re one of the participants who’ve received an email introducing you to Active Search, feel free to reply it with your comments and ideas. If we haven’t been able to include you in our limited test, feel free to post a comment on our blog.

Cheers,

Active Search for Mail Desktop Feature Team – Oji, Stephen, Alexei, Joshua, Bryan, Manish and Aly

P.S. Roll Credits…