Exploring Search Innovations With Microsoft Live Search

windows live
I was playing around with Microsoft’s new Live Search , and I have to say that coupled with some excellent new features, the look and feel of this new search engine is quite a breath of fresh air.

Firstly, Windows Live Search comes with a never ending scrollbar. Let’s face it, while Google may pull up 600 million search items, most of us just want to look at the links on the front page. In fact research has shown that most of us never go past page 3.

The “never ending scrollbar” attempts to address this by making an extra long first page (which goes into the hundreds or thousands of “first page results”). Speed is not really affected, as only a small number of results are displayed at first, and are only incrementally retrieved as you scroll downwards. Although initial reports from Tech Crunch commented about it’s poor speed, the performance now does seem somewhat seamless if you’ve got sufficient bandwidth.

live search

This feature really comes to life for image searching, where trying to browse images from the net has never been easier.

Here’s a quick rundown of other features:

Instant drilldown of search results by allowing you to search within any site with a single click.
Lets you choose how they want to read their results (just headlines, or short excerpts)
Allows you to save customized searches that allow results from certain sites to rise to the top/ be excluded according to your preference.
RSS Feeds search on front page - Something which I am quite surprised neither Yahoo or Google have done. Yes, this is available as a feature in Yahoo/Google’s personal RSS startpages, but not part of their main page - which means if you’re using another RSS reader eg. Netvibes, Microsoft Live Search would be a clearly better search engine to find feeds.

msn search
Yes, I know you might say Miscrosoft Search is inferior to Yahoo and Google, but give it a fair shake by first comparing the engines side by side in the famous search engine blind test. You’d be surprised.