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The excitable folks working on Live Search at Microsoft think they have come a long way in nine months with their work on relevance.

Live Search Team Channeling Steve Ballmer

And boy, is their blog post title excited about it. "Relevance, Relevance, Relevance!" Shades of the famous Dancing Ballmer video, where he chants the word 'Developers' over and over for several seconds.

The cheeky people revamping Live Search gave that moment a hat tip as they talked about making relevance an even greater part of their search engine. Their latest update spent over nine months in the works.

They list reduced spam as an improvement in their index:

You might ask how we know spam is down? Experts on our team take a “randomly selected and statistically significant” set of searches and measure the percentage of spam in the results. With this release that number is down in a non-trivial manner and we are excited about that.

That would be quite an accomplishment, but their choice of a sample search, Microsoft taco truck, has a parked domain filled with affiliate links as its top result. Less generous individuals might call that spam.

They have grown the index to 20 billion pages, well above their previous index for Live Search. The team also noted improvements with the summaries or 'snippets' provided in Live Search as a description of each search result.

The dawning realization that relevance is important to searchers took a long time to get to Microsoft. But as they see their future fortunes tied to online advertising, where market leader Google devotes itself to relevance, they had little choice but to improve their engine.

It's a shame the Microsoft taco truck ran over their reduced spam claim.