Slashdot Mirror
Windows Live Search goes Live
novus ordo writes "Microsoft has launched the Windows Live Search. Among the reports,
Microsoft Search Senior Product Manager, Justin Osmer says that "The beta, and a revision expected in a few months, will challenge market leader Google."" I like the more dynamic image searching tool. It seems really slow- I'm not sure if that's the dynamicness (is that a word?) or just standard
launch lag.
See, this is the differance between MS and Google. All of google's products are Beta and work perfectly.
But when microsoft says Beta they mean: "In the beggining there was nothing, And God said Let there be light..."
-first post?
*gasp*
/.'ed MS?
We
Gotta be glad now they don't operate out of the UK.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, that was an interesting product demo, I got the "server busy" message. At least it wasnt blue.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
That scroll bar is horrible. Nice UI design Microsoft.
I searched for "google" and got a long wait, then an error popup
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
We /.ed a search engine? or is it this slow by design?
MAybe its becuase we are using non-ms browsers?? can you imagine their logs.. stating that the firat 80% was firefox or others?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
The page still hasn't loaded, and I had time to type this response.
It's got some custom Java/ActiveX thing that won't load in my browser.
Oddly enough, Google just has plain HTML, and it works fine. I can't imagine that there's a connection.
That's sarcasm, for the impaired.
Still waiting for it to load....
Reeses
A quick test I performed showed interesting results. I plugged in the word Galen in both Live and Google. Live returned 1,160,846 results while Google gave 13,200,000 results. Considering Live was just released the discrepancy isn't hard to understand. What was interesting was what the first result was. In the case of Live the first result was a photo studio run by Galen and Barbara Powell. For Google the first result was much more relevant: a link to the University of Virgina Health System which talked about the medical practice from the past of which Galen is listed in the links.
The second result for both Live and Google were the same, the Galen Institute homepage.
While one test doesn't a study make, considering Microsofts track record of returning results, I don't forsee myself using their service (especially with all the clutter on the screen).
As an aside, does everyone else get the weather forecast for LA in the lower left corner? I'm on the opposite coast so maybe it's related to where the servers are rather than what IP you come from.t
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Forward and back buttons do nothing. Yay.
I searched for "linux" and it didn't return any results!
If they want to challenge Google they aren't going about it very well...
They certainly are competing with Google on response time.
I probably could walk cross-country to Microsoft and submit my search on paper quicker than this. Or maybe use the cans connected by string.
I've been wanting to search the internet for *years, and if I just download IE I can!!!! Wheee!!!
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I guess they didn't get the simplicity we like so much of google
/down
why the hell do we need scroolsbars in the search window!! we have one in the browser.. can't event use page up
and so many cheap baby graphics, no wonder it's so slow
I hate it already
Do what you wilt shall be the whole of the law Love is the law, love under will Capital drives the will of mankind
www.google.com
I know that's just pure nasty - I just couldn't help it.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I got an error on the page... looks like they are using oracle as a backend? :)
Was ms sql 2005 to strong for such a simple search engine?
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.
Hmm... Doesn't seem to work at all with opera. Just says loading.... loading.... i could have performs a dozen google searches in the time i waited.
Seems broken already; too much "loading" and "try again at a later time". It's hard to believe that this is because of their Live.com page being Slashdotted. The reason I like Google is because of how fast it is. I wouldn't tell people to go "Google it" when they need to know something if it took them more than 10 seconds to do so.
Okay, so it's a beta. I still expected a little more responsiveness from Microsoft's newest ace-in-the-hole.
This is just like my kids Windows - Slow as sin for no apparent reason.
Well, more standard MS ripping and Karma Whoring. But think about it... Have you ever paid money to google? I use their services all the time, and have for years, yet I have never clicked a paid link. I don't even notice their ads anymore. But like it or not, I have paid for a lot of MS stuff.
Do you really think that MS doesn't have the personell necessary to create a great search? Just because google has a "fun" work environment doesn't make them the greatest.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Maybe someone should post a coral link. Let off some of the load from MS.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
look at that little spinning blue LOADING circle at the bottom of the page... looks like they stole it from Firefox. lol.
Live.com:
Loading results for query boobies
images 1-15 of 3957
6/15 are of the bird
Google.com (SafeSearch Off):
Results 1 - 20 of about 51,700 for boobies (0.07 seconds)
4/20 are of the bird
I think the results speak for themselves.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Interestingly enough, a search for "miserable failure" leads www.michaelmoore.com at the top, instead of Google's standard George W. Bush biography
My search for linux did eventually get some hits. It just took a while. At first it only had 9 results, but after I sat there for a while more showed up. What really pissed me off and made this unusable from my point of view was the javascript (or whatever) scrollbar. It didn't respond to mouse wheel. Honestly, if everything else about this service somehow became better than google's offering, I still wouldn't use it just because of the lack of mouse wheel. I wonder if its worth booting into windows to see if they made some weird ass keybindings for the mouse wheel in IE....
and the explorer window finally showed something, then locked up and closed itself. truely beta. and it's still loading. i had time to type this, realize that my url was old, change it, try it in explorer, watch explorer crash, listen to some asshat at work try to be funny, at it's still loading.
no i have not shot my gun in the air and gone 'Ahh!'
Loading....
Try using Googles cache
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
On my Mac running the current version of Safari, I get a plain search box and a condescending "help" text right below it:
... loading.
Find anything using the new
Windows Life Search!
below that is Something that is Loading. What it is I cannot tell since it's eternally loading.
I tried searching for "Slashdot" and it's still
So hmm. It's condescending and doesn't seem to work to boot.
Doesn't look like I'll be back.
D
The dynamic window showing the results...well, it just sucks. It doesn't show enough results, and the scroller doesn't give any kind of context as to where you are within the results. Its slow. That may be due to this computer being slow, but I don't have to worry about it on any other search engine. I'd almost prefer frames (not by much).
I was going to tell all of that to MS, but the "help us improve" link was 404 when I tried it...
What the heck is with the funky scroll bars? They're less acurate and slower than regular slow bars.
Also, while it's nice to have a more/less info slider on the right side, it doesn't really add much at this point.
Pretty colors, though.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Gee, an image search function that makes me click a little 'next' arrow to see each result, one by one. How incredibly useful! With innovation like this, I wonder how companies like Apple and Google can still be in business...
This guy's the limit!
I really dislike the scrolling method they're using...It takes over my normal mouse scroll and goes really, really slow. If anything, that would prevent me from using the site.
I hate it when websites feel their users don't know how to use their own input devices and feel they should take over them for you to "assist you".
Simplicity is a virtue that Microsoft regularly ignores. The additional features on the main page and the loading graphics are just unnecessary. And apparently using a normal scroll bar isn't good enough to look through your results.
Their algorithm could deduce the meaning of life and I'd still use Google just so I didn't have to deal with that UI.
I find the one long search results scrolling page to be quite overwhelming. I like the chunking effect of 10 or 20 results per page. While it definitely emphasizes the importance of position on the page, which might be unfair to #7, for example, at least it's mentally manageable.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
First things I see: - Slow as hell - Non-standard scroll bar hard to figure out - Search results returning weird things No thank you MS. Try again.
This worked particularly well!a ge=results
http://www.live.com/#q=gates%20pie&scope=images&p
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
In the case of Live the first result was a photo studio run by Galen and Barbara Powell. For Google the first result was much more relevant: a link to the University of Virgina Health System which talked about the medical practice from the past of which Galen is listed in the links.
Relevant to whom? Is this the first time you have used a search engine?
I'm hoping you at least tried "Galen and medical" before you decided that Live's inability to read your mind wasn't reasonable.
What's the deal with the scrolling in the search window!? I don't understand it, those slider bars are just annoying and (though I use a scroll wheel almost exlusively) not having the standard scroll bars down the side of my browser window is awful!
The image search isn't that good either, as I can't easily find a way of displaying thumbnails of all of them.
On the upside, it's returned more relevant results than MSN search so they seem to be taking a step in the right direction.
Think I'll be sticking with Google's clean uncluttered interface for a bit longer yet though - it has yet to fail me!
I did a search for Firefox. No results.
I searched for 'Microsoft google" and I got as the first result a google page I have never seen before http://www.google.com/microsoft, so I think it actually works!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
How to Remove Linux and Install Windows XP
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
So far i have found nothing with this search engine but a piece of text called "loading..." Im not really sure thats what i want. It wont help me make guacamole, thats for sure.
I always get sent back to the page i had open before (wich was slashdot of course) when using firefox 1.5 under linux.
I like it!
The first time I heard about Google, the first thing I typed into the search window was my name. And when some forum post I had typed up years earlier showed up, I was relieved that it worked. Then I typed in my business name, which showed up in the first page of results. Then I typed in my wife's name, and her Yahoo! profile showed in the list of results. From then I was hooked.
Likewise, I typed in all the same queries to MS's new search engine, and yes, I get results, but none of them are relevant. Searching on my name shows as a first result a message I posted to a club forum that I was in over six years ago. I hardly think anybody else has linked to that particular forum message, so is the whole concept of page popularity, like Google's PageRank, null and void in MS's new search engine? This new search engine reminds me of Yahoo! circa 1994 where any and every result would show up regardless of popularity.
And the "Loading..." reminds me too much of the rotating sand-timer in Windows. I can just see regular Windows users staring at the "Loading..." message for minutes without results, then thinking that their computer stopped responding, forcing a hard-reboot.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Ok, so why does it say it's loading when I haven't done anything? I left it for 5 minutes and nothing new came up.
/.
It also took a long time to get back to
And I'm using IE at work.
Just AJAX, same as Google's customized home
for both Google and MS Live search engines. Interesting results.
It really doesn't matter if Google is returning a few million clones, so long as the first few links have what you're looking for (preferrably the first). I would HOPE a search engine would show me every single clone site recahable by different addresses - just not at the top of the list. Unless it was the really the most relevant...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This seems to me to be the normal MSN results wrapped up in adverts for other MS offerings. I remember Google being such a break through because of it's uncluttered, clear and fast results. Live seems like a step backwards to me!
Internet Marketing Consultants
I was puzzled as to why running the front page from firefox gives a different result then IE
turns out that the "Gadget Gallery" among others does not apper in IE 6 sp2 unless you click on and off of the "The Basics" section
shows up fine in Firefox, just a little ironic
You know, the very first time I went to www.google.com, I knew exactly what to do. The very first time I do _anything_ with M$, I haven't got a clue. I think their google-killer suffers from a bit of UI-overload, don't you?
I give you the ads that were shown, you try to guess my search expression:
Shop Chairs at Horchow
Horchow.com offers a vast assortment of unique items from around the...
www.horchow.com
Chairs for Business Quotes
Free quotes from multiple dealers - compare office chair options....
www.buyerzone.com
Desk Chair - Staples
Shop for desk chairs - free shipping on orders $50 or more.
www.staples.com
Searched for my name and my CPU pegged at 100%
Microsoft is going to have to realize that not everybody in the world uses IE... They have gone to great lengths to make their UI clever and "cool", but when it doesn't work in Firefox or Safari or Opera, they're shooting their own foot. I realize its a beta, so the slowness doesn't bother me. I'm not a fan of the UI either... and I especially hate the scrolling mechanism. What ever happened to a simple, easy to use, search engine that returns good results? Oh wait, that's google.
firestream.net
I think Microsoft hired monkeys to build and design this site. It's utter and total crap!
Do you really think that MS doesn't have the personell[sic] necessary to create a great search? Just because google has a "fun" work environment doesn't make them the greatest.
Actually, Google has a lot of the best people because of their work environment and because they are very picky. The strategy is not so different from my current job. Relax the environment, no dress code, free snack food and soda, free beer in the fridge, no one checking what hours you work, a couple couches is you need a cat nap. What does this cost our company? Probably less than the salary difference of one high paid employee if they decided to move to the job that just paid the best. People work here because they want to and because they are smart enough to realize that money isn't everything and if you're going to spend a huge portion of you life working, doing so in a fun environment while working on interesting projects is a better choice than retiring two years earlier all stressed out and hating your field.
This means we have to hire motivated people, but also means the really smart ones want to work here. We have some ex-MS employees here. We also have had Google steal away a guy. MS has a lot of people, including some very smart ones, but their culture makes it hard for them to really get anything done right. Throwing money at a problem and hiring a dozen managers who get in each other's way and are constantly modifying what you are working on is not the best way to get things done.
I did a search for the word "Linux" and what do you think the results were?
Gee... let me try. I'll enter the single word "linux" into Live.
Nearly 100 million entries. And as far as I can tell, that one is no where near the top (I haven't found it yet). The first entry is a link to linux.org.
Something is lame here... but it ain't Live.
On the down side, scrolling should never have momentum! When I want to stop scrolling, I want the scrolling to stop immediately. I've only used the page for a couple minutes but it's already obvious that their scrolling implementation is a disaster. It feels like driving a car with bad brakes; you're always shooting past where you want to stop.
I did notice that my mouse's scroll wheel works on their page, and it does a nicer job than clicking on the arrows. But not that much nicer; it still sucks.
I don't know how they allowed this current way of outputting results to be released to the public. Regular HTML output is a thousand times more useful.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
(especially with all the clutter on the screen).
Dude, you miss the point... this is supposed to contend with this: Google Customized Home. Except Live.com actually came first. If you want to you can close all of the boxes and get a search page that is just as simple as the Google page - a "Windows Live beta" splash icon in the upper left hand corner (smaller than the Google logo), a search box in the middle of the page, and a very small "©2006 Microsoft | privacy | legal | feedback | support | Windows Live Ideas" at the bottom. Actually cleaner than Google's default page.
Whether they can make a good search tool is irrelevant.
It's about whether they do make such a tool.
Google did, Microsoft didn't.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Live.com
This query has triggered our safe search filter.
Flexible settings are coming soon.
0 results
Google images
Results 1 - 20 of about 48,000 for titties (0.11 seconds)
So how come with Live, boobies get through, but titties are blocked? Google wins anyway.
Oh no... it's the future.
perfectly here in germany.. :))
it's not been on heise.de
--
http://www.isnochys.com/
It bugs me when companies try to treat the internet as some sort of giant application server. The internet is great at serving up hypertext documents. Emulating a desktop app?...not so much.
BTW, terrible design with the "scrollbar".
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
... gmail breaks the back button too ...
... no they didnt break the backbutton in firefox 1.5.0.1 ... Microsoft 1, Google 0!)
(and actually
You ./'d Microsoft!.. You bastards!
SERVER BUSY
Bad place to try to save some money.... Maybe its time to spend that (pinkie in mouth) 50 billion dollars and get some new servers.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Results of a 1 of search comparison
I searched "WoW macro useItem"
Both Google and Windows Live suggested "WoW macro use Item"
Windows Live returned 14 hits
Google returned about 491
Windows Live included 3 commercial links.
Google returned no commercial links.
Two of the commercial links were for sites selling bugs, hacks and exploits which when used are violations of the TOS and EULA you agree to when using the game.
Thanks Microsoft for promoting violation of EULA agreements. We know where you stand on this.
The search results themselves seem fine so the search algorithm looks to be, at least to me, acceptable. But the search results list itself is horrible. There's no scrollbar to speak of, so there's no way to quickly drag up and down through the list. Use the buttons on the right to go up and down by clicking (or dragging for autoscroll), or your scroll wheel, but that's it.
Might be nitpicking, but then again just because you CAN do fancy interface crap like this doesn't mean you SHOULD, especially when it affects the usability.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Simpler than Google
:P
check and mate
So in other words if I plug in www.live.com to get to the Live homepage I have to click on things to clear everything out compared to plugging in www.google.com and looking at an almost uncluttered page?
If this is Microsofts idea of competing with a simple idea, they have, not unsurprisingly, not understood what the word simplicity means.
Besides, if the settings I perform on the Live page are kept as a cookie on my machine I'd have to reset everything the next time I go back since I always clear my cookies at the end of every surfing session.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The reason I started using google was because their front page contained only a single header image, a couple words of text and a search bar. That's all a search engine needs. If MS wants to compete, they need to unclutter this page a LOT.
Disclaimer: I used to work for MSN (this disclaimer will soon be ironic, though)
I just loaded up live.com and searched for myself. Decent results, whatever...search sites don't usually wow me any more. Then I click on the "images" tab and...both of my Firefox windows just disappear.
I am very amused that Microsoft found a way to crash Firefox on RH4.
But the clear winner: Windows Live
So it's got something to do with Windows(R)? Nope. Nothing that I can see. It's a web server that can be called up by Mac's, Suns, Crays, etc... No windows in those.
So the "Live" business it's:
IMHO The Worst Name Ever
"Microsoft Live scrollbar".
So say we all
Wow, Google must be really quaking in their boots about this. The page looks like a textbook example on how not to design an AJAX page. Apart from the apparent performance problems:
- Why use custom widgets? Does Windows not include a scrollbar widget?
- Why is the custom scrollbar completely broken? Why does the scrollbar not indicate how far through the search results I am? Why can I not drag it easily?
- Why smooth scroll?
- Why are none of the 'links' on the page actual links? If you use Javascript links like that, middle-click to open in new window/tab doesn't work.
- Why is their a speech-bubble like thing partially covering the search window
- Why do I have to click on a zoom icon in order to search? Oh, you mean a circle with a line coming out of it means "search"? Why not write "search" on the button, then?
...was a reference to South Park. Do geeks like South Park? :??:
No, it's not. Dynamism is.
If you're going to publish something for hundreds of thousands of people to read, why not use a dictionary?
And Microsoft does not get it, and never will. Best example of that is this video. Enjoy!
Oh yeah, for irony's sake the video is on Google's Video. Beta. And it works.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Watching that spinning thingie... sooo calming...
Hope they're gonna make a screensafer outta it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Still waiting on the answer. Guess I'll have to try Clusty.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Quick! Lets all go there and click "feedback" at the bottom, then tell them how much it sucks!!! Maybe they'll get the hint and change the name to dead.com
firestream.net
Google is good because it does what it says it will do: Find stuff. This is just too much. Too many nifty things making it slow, too many nifty things making it hard to comprehend, too many nifty things that are broken. KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid! for stupid people like me.
I can't middle click on results to load them in a new tab in Firefox. That is the single biggest thing I do when doing to reference search on google. Do search, middle click relevant-looking pages, then check them one at a time since they are all loaded in the background.
And, yes, I'm an English Major.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
What looks friendlier?
f e.com/&&DI=293&IG=d7f8c42c9650473ea6a0 232b436c2b8c&POS=1&CM=WPU&CE=1&CS= OTH&SR=1"><strong>Traffic</strong> <strong>Life</strong></a>
<a class="l" href="http://www.trafficlife.com/"><b>Traffic Life</b></a>
or
<a href="http://g.msn.com/9SE/1?http://www.trafficli
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
...no new site shall pass unslashdotted.
So say we all
Takes you to a Google Map with less functionality and no link back to the main Live search. Only way to get back to the actual searching is via backbutton or manually typing it back into the Address Bar.
*high five, Bill!*
This is a huge missing feature. I made two random searches on very benign items in the images section. Both on Live returned one thumbnail of a naked woman (all relevant parts covered, but naked none the less). As a father and a person who atleast attempts to live accourding to a moral standard, I do not want to see, nor do I want my kids to see this stuff. Difficult as it is to keep it away from them, at least google offeres a decent filter that I can set to weed it out. The same searches on google images returned no questionable pics on the first 3 pages (did not check any further).
Religion and politics, without the flame. godgab.org
This should be considered the most relevent test for a search engine. It is widely accepted that the internet's main function is to store porn. The test consists of an image search for the term "porn" and a comparison of the number of images found.
Google
about 105,000 for porn
Fair enough, now let's see Live:
This query has triggered our safe search filter.
Flexible settings are coming soon.
Okay I know wich one I'd chose.
I had success upon using www.live.com with Firefox 1.5.x but have not had any success on Safari. Anyone think that's intentional? Maybe we'll only be able to get the "real" search results if we use Internet Explorer. If they're not going to make the page simple and accessible to all platforms and devices, there's no way that this is going to compete with google or yahoo.
Middle-click doesn't work.
Referer doesn't contain search term.
Historically, these crazy new DHTML UI convensions have not been well received, and as technically interesting their UI may be I hardly feel compelled to switch from Google.
Next.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
MS doesn't seem to if this is their best contender. The UI is absolutely deplorable. I cannot imagine who at MS used this and said to themselves "well, this UI is good enough for a public beta, lets try this out!"
No matter how good their searches may be, as that as the UI is that abominal, people will (and rightly should) stick with google.
Yeah ... until you actually do a search for something.
First result with live is www.johnkerry.com (ahh the good ol' days). Google now gives you waffle relevant results.
Another thing... They done away with "pages" by giving you a scrolling mechanism that lets you continuously scroll through all results. I already HATE this for a couple of reasons. #1 being that when I'm searching for something, a lot of times I remember a link that was good based on the page it was on. So by doing away with pages, they've just made it so much harder to remember a good link in your results. Anyways, I'm done, back to Google.
firestream.net
I'm not sure what the hell you guys are talking about.
Entering Linux returned over 98 million hits, with linux.org at number 1.
Google returned over 69 million, with google.com at number 1.
Misspelling Slashdot, it suggested the correct spelling and returned 1.7 million hits with slashdot.org at number 1.
All results returned quickly.
I was wondering when companies were going to figure out that if you wanted people to buy new computers to browse the web and read e-mail you have to make the web more complicated. Now thanks to Google and Microsoft, the battle of the Internet bloat war will ensue, and finally there will be a use for the average Joe to buy a dual-core processor with 2gb of ram: browsing the Web 2.0 (TM)!
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Loading (insert 45 second wait)
to slow web searches to a crawl.........
I typed in FFXI, about half of the top 10 results returned involved selling gil (gold), in google I got no gil selling on the first page (other then the ad's, which are both full of gil sellers)
I do like the infinite scroll idea instead of paging tho.
reasons why google is sunk:
-despite being the no. 1 search engine, they still haven't cracked a million users for gmail.
-despite being the no. 1 search engine, they haven't cracked a million users for gtalk.
-they make no money on any of their products.
-they only have an advertising model that has plenty of competition.
-yahoo and ms can leverage IM and desktop share respectively, into searches. google cannot.
-google will start giving aol preferential ad positioning. google's biggest and most valuable unmonetized piece in www.google.com. they will start monetizing the front page - losing their core consumer.
-microsoft and yahoo will aggressively start undercutting google to destroy their ad revenue.
-if google is developing a linux desktop OS - their sunk already because the desktop is dead. if google is developing an os for portables, they'll run into issues because of the many different platforms out there to support - which means it will be a while before they deploy.
-google is a stock run up without clear avenues of revenue generation and revenue diversification. The "eyeballs" business model is what burst the bubble the first time.
-microsoft is in cars, gaming consoles, the military, desktop, mobiles, embedded in all sorts of products, international, medical, etc. google is a fucking search engine. even if microsoft died off - it would take them tens years or so to fade away just because of the installed user base. If everyone stops googling for shit - google dies TOMORROW.
-lamers root for google because they view google as extensions of themselves. underdogs... a dog that will have his day, etc. winners root for winners. A drunken staggering microsoft will crush a thousand companies this year. Windows Live functionality is awesome. what does google have to offer in return? google pack??????? lol.
I like winners. You guys like people who finish in second place, or third or fourth. In other words, you like losers.
tough break!!!!!!!!!!
I searched for "yoshi's island faq" and didn't get anything that would help me find that last red coin in stage 2-6. It sent me to a comedy site, a music site, an art site, a commercial site, and a worship page. This fails hard.
www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/265861
www.ocremix.org/game/71
yoshi.2yr.net/games/yi_faq.php
www.clubskill.com/?view=article&article=650
www.journeywood.com/yoshi/
Camino 1.0 (universal) on OS X. Search comes up, the scroll goes down, but won't return.
After about 1 minute some ads appeared. Overall very very slow. Not ready for prime time.
Standard M$ quality.
-k
Your mind moves quicker than a nun's first curry. - A. Rimmer
...to match current response times.
- reg
It's designed to be slower on anything but IE/Windows!
When I preview the new Mail functionality on the front page (the preview only works in IE) I see the new interface. When I actually log in (with an old account or with a new test account) I get the old interface. Is anyone seeing the new interface? Man, this whole thing blows. Especially in FireFox.
You know, the very first time I went to www.google.com, I knew exactly what to do. The very first time I do _anything_ with M$, I haven't got a clue.
If you have nothing to do, you might wanna head over to http://www.live.com/> where Micro-Soft has just lauched a new search page.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
"Your search is important to us, please be on hold. Our next search monkey will cater to your query. If you move away, I am gonna f'king kill you. Thanks for being with MS, make the world a better place. Ting Tong"
Try doing an Image Search for "porn"
This query has triggered our safe search filter. Flexible settings are coming soon.
Luckily the same thing doesn't happen for "tianamen square"
wow...all I read are midly-to-very negative comments.
Google is a well established search leader, MS is at best...a toddler, lets at least give them a chance.
Sure the page is cluttered, its full of toys, its "pretty". MS's aim has always been to the general "mr. joe nobody" type of person. and apparently that kind of people think its good if its pretty.
Personally, I think its ok but they'll have to do better than this if they remotely wanna try to challenge google. Google's strong point is "it just works". It works on all browser and it gives relevant results. Pretty simple goal heh ? If MS can do just that, they should do fairly ok.
As always, I believe MS is releasing their search monster early precisely to see the reaction of people so they can know what people want. So lets be constructive.
Hey mr gates, you wanna get my vote ? then stop trying to get me with pretty widgets, what brings me back to google is its search ability so why dont you start by making a strong search engine, if it can do some alchemy to guess what im trying to find, all the better.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
MSN search just has piss-poor support for proximity in its searches. Until it can handle multi-word queries as well as google it's just a toy. Adding all these extra wiz-bang AJAX features is cute and I may even use a few from time to time. But google is still my homepage because 99% of my time spent online is search and I want the best tool available.
Much respect for the effort, but reinventing portals and copying features is not the key to innovation no matter how flashy you are.
I searched for "Live" in Google, got 2,650,000,000 results.
I searched for "Google" in Live, got 63,232,036 results.
Obviously, Live wins. err... I mean Google wins... No, Live! Google! Loovle!
Whatever...
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
I'm at work, will have to test on Firefox tonight, but on IE version 6.0.2800 under XP my first result was a browser lockup! This turd won't even run under their own browser!
I restarted IE to try again, and this time it let me put in a search term, after waiting a full minute for all its garbage to load. Jesus, even their damned web pages are bloated.
I test search engines to see if it can find MY stuff. A good one I use is "how to quit smoking cigarettes," which I wrote at K5 a few years ago and have reprinted on my own site.
Ask.com surprised me with a slew of plagairisms, pages that ripped out my content, whole. Google likewise does, with the original and my copy on the second page of search results in Google.
Mine didn't show up at all on MS's search. It did, however, show tons of commercial sites heavily laden with ads, and sites selling stop-smoking crap.
You get five results showing, which are in a scrollable iFrame.
In short, Google killer? This has to be the biggest joke of the century so far. Of all the search engines I've tried in the last 9 years, MS's is the absolute worst in all respects. It isn't even as good as MSN's search!
Google has nothing whatever to fear.
-mcgrew
Scrolling fucks with your history, so if you want to go back, you have to either click the back button a few thousand times. Also, highlighting seems slightly broken. If you go over certain thresholds, it highlights a chunk backwards from where your cursor is.
No comment.
i'm a google bitch now.... :/
Should I be surprised that it apparently doesn't seem compatible with the Mac OS or Safari? Or Internet Explorer for that platform?
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Does anyone else notice they acroll additional ads when you scroll down? They must have to put all the results on one page that way they can say that they found what you were looking for and put it on the first page.
and webcrawler came up first (people still use that?) :)
MS live and google didnt appear under the search results for me
i was only able to search once, no other results worked at all...
I actually like the scrolling, and if you want to know where you are, then look above the search results where it says something like "3-6 (355,234)". Plus, for a long time, I've wanted google to let me show more results on one page.
The search results suck though. I attend University of Waterloo, and google seems to give nice preference to us. If I search for a club name it will come up with waterloo results on the first page (no I don't enter waterloo in the search). Live, however, gives the same results far down the list.
Also, has anyone noticed that sites with a cgi or php main page give two results: first one's blank, then the second one is the page you want.
Really nice way of using ajax. you can scroll through the search result very fast by click and drag the scroller up or down. Definitely an improvement over msn search.
Wow. Just wow. Click a search result. Hit back. It has to load the results again. Just wow.
Server Error in '/' Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".
Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.
Dude, that's a pawn. It can't move backwards.
Google.com: 17,137 bytes
Search.live.com: 386,497 bytes
Google.com is simpler. Search.live.com has fewer visual elements, but takes 15 times as long to load. On a T1, for instance, search.live.com will require an absolute minimum of two seconds to load. On a moderately busy T1 you're looking at ten full seconds as a very reasonable real-world figure.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
In the case of Live the first result was a photo studio run by Galen and Barbara Powell. For Google the first result was much more relevant: a link to the University of Virgina Health System which talked about the medical practice from the past of which Galen is listed in the links.
A second test: I want to find the photo studio of Galen and Barbara Powell. I type "Galen" into both search engines, and, voila Microsoft's "algorithms" are amazingly more intelligent than Google's.
--- "The idea is to die young, as late as possible." -- Ashley Montague
The very first submission I put in resulted in an ASPX error page. How funny. It's working now but is slow. This might be nice if they get rid of those errors and speed it up. It certainly wouldn't be able to handle googles traffic in it's current state.
I bet they failed to pay extorsion fees to all the ma bells to get priority access to all us end surfers!
-- OK another bad plug to old stories.
Am I the only one who got the eight-dots-in-a-circle "loading..." animation for quite a while and noticed that it looks EXACTLY like the loading animation in the upper right corner of the default theme for Firefox? And am I the only one who thinks that's hilarious?
Interestingly, when I looked at the page before the article was released, the image searching tool was present.
Now, it is gone.
Just hangs on "loading" in Safari on my Mac. Works in Firefox, but I have to agree that scroll bar has got to go.
I guess the live.com is only two lines of code:
print "Content-type: text/html"print "<h1>Server too busy</h1>"
The truth is it is very live and very responsive, in which sense it is similar to Google's offer. However, it is too simple for me and does not even provide a search box!
shit quality, as always.
I love smooth scrolling, in any app. It helps my mind to realize where the contents are going.
Without smooth scrolling I move the mouse wheel and I don't realize where I am, I need to stop and look if I've gone beyond of where I wanted.
It's like using a car with just a "0% acceleration" "100% acceleration" modes.
this is one of MS's classic mistakes, take a simple idea, cram it full of crap that people already get from elsewhere, post a broken beta and make the classic claim to fame while secretly waiting for the immmenent blue screen
It's a new UI paradigm I have not seen before. It's a dragbar that takes you through the search results, which are streamed from the server in real time as you drag. No more paging through search results. I think it is a novel idea.
PS the Page Up / Down and Home keys work too, as well as your scrollwheel.
Once you realize it is not a scrollbar and actually try it a bit you'll see hwo cool it is.
Also try the 'Add To My Live" button, tres cool. The image search is also blowing Google's away.
Guess Eric aint quite buried yet...
The speech bubble pop up that says "Find anything using Windows Live Search!" should clearly read "Find anything using Windows Live Search? "
Answer: Not a lot! At least, nowehere near as much as with Google - and I donm't have that stupid interface to deal with... and I can use the Back button still. C'mon guys, just write the whole thing in Flash 'cause I'm sure you cna make ti more damned annoying if you really put your midns to it..
But for those who don't like all the ads, click on the "Search" magnifying glass icon without entering any text - and voila! -all the ads are gone (at least on Firefox)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I tried some searches, got mad and made one last search... it didn't like me.
p ng
http://fredrik.rambris.com/images/microsoft-live.
It says "find anything", so I searched for "windows source code" -- and it returned it as the #1 hit!!!
For reference, it's at: www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/source.php
he complained about clutter, not size. And it takes less than 2 second to load on my DSL. Those scripts don't have to load before you can search.
I asked Live Chat 5 + 5, and it took 10-15 seconds to give me a link to the IE home page. Yep, this guy is a real google-killer.
Perhaps there's a preference to change this, but having to scroll over the images to get their particulars (size, location) is a little time consuming. Being able to resize the thumbnails is a good feature, but I don't like the pop-out. I want streamlined, not MacOS X eye candy! ;-)
and I'm quite convinced that their results for "Windows sucks donkey dongs" has been doctored. So I have no use for the thing.
OK, so it isn't working, which is about what I was expecting. But curiously enough for a front page whose developers were confident enough to call it XHTML strict, it has 265 errors.
Then again, if it actually was XHTML strict, using even the correct MIME type, Internet Explorer wouldn't attempt to render it.
It's a beta. It has some interesting features. Yes, not everything makes sense or works well. It's a beta. But, with all that said, remember, it's a beta. Beta.
I particularly liked the mouse scroll zoom capabilities on the map.
It certainly doesn't seem as crappy as the fanboyz would have you believe.
I'm far from an MS lover, but give credit where it's due...
Heh, I won't get modded much for this 'me too' post but,
Ran a few searches which give me great results on Google.
The text search mostly bombed.
The image search barely found the subject.
This round, Google wins. Maybe later MS Search will be better, but frankly, this badly NEEDS its 'beta' descriptor.
Nuff said.
I think I will just let this analogy die gracefully here without getting into an argument over what the sun's 'uptime' could be construed as. I dont know, normally I would banter over til Kingdom Come... maybe I am sick.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
All this "Windows Live" marketing crap will soon be dead.
The UI on this thing is awful. Why did they abandon web-browser scroll bars in favour of their stupid little tool that doesn't even show you where abouts on the page you are? Now I can't use the scroll-wheel on my mouse.
The results are okay-ish... as in, they're not particularly bad results, but they're nothing outstanding, either. They're probably not as good as Google results, but who is to say which results are "correct"? It doesn't matter. Google has earned peoples' trust.
It's difficult to believe that Microsoft is taking Google seriously, because it shouldn't be THAT difficult for a multi-billion dollar company to write a search engine with a semi-decent UI.
This is a typical Microsoft offering. Disobeys web standards and is lacking in quality. The difference this time is that Google is the market leader, and even if Microsoft were leading in search, people could easily switch to something superior like Google.
The funny thing is that this isn't the first search engine that Microsoft has pitted against Google, and by the looks of things, it won't be the last, either. I wonder if they'll ever give up. I suppose they have the resources not to.
I would expect this whole "Live" thing that MS is doing to be "Live" and stuff, so I don't see why it's necessary that they refresh the top.location when I hit search... I mean, it's not like it's even doing anything anyways.
I can't stand those scroll bars that recenter themselves after you scroll. Google Picasa uses them, and I guess someone at Microsoft ripped off the idea. They are a pain in the ass and counter intuitive, especially considering you can tell how far down the list you are. While I know that Microsoft gets rid of the Page 1 2 3 4 5... links by using this method, it still is not a very well implemented control.
What I don't think Search engines get is that if you list more then 20 results your doing nobody a favour. How often have you searched for something and then actually scrolled or navigated to the 100th results page to click on the 10,003rd link? If you don't find what your looking for in the first 10 - 20 search results then you need to narrow your search, or the search engine has to become a little more selective in the results it returns. Listing millions of search results is just dumb.
I would applaud a search engine that only ever returned the top 10 links of a search. It can still have a link to list the millions of other search results, but it only gives you the top 10 links in a concise set of results. I just think that Google and MSN are trying to out do each other by listing as many search results as possible, to demonstrate who has the bigger....index, but this does nobody good.
Its time to bring some quality into search engine results and stop this need for large quantity search results. Then at least they can get rid of that God awful scroll bar as you would never need it.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I was scrolling through a test search, and all of a sudden their crappy excuse for a scroll bar jumped to the left! What the hell? Suddenly, ads popped up in its place.
Advertisers are not going to like that. It will cause many, many mis-clicks on the ads. I narrowly escaped clicking on the ad under my mouse.
If this were a site using Google ads, they would be suspended by Google for violating quality assurances that Google gives their advertisers about the pages on which their ads are published.
Anyone noticed that the page uses the PNG format? The same PNG format which is ill supported in IE?
Doesn't the whole thing feel like this big developer masteurbation? What is this idea again about dragging stuff around web pages? Collapsing boxes? Custom scrollbars? Sliding animations? Cramming very disparate things into a single place, like we did things all at the same time? Bad from the beginning.
This thing is awful, and I don't even hate MS. It doesn't work in Safari, and at least in Firefox the non-standard way of dynamically scrolling through search results is hard to control. Why does MS insist on fullfilling the stereotypes?
Fleur de Sel
I did a quick search on Live for Vibrapods, known in the audio world as rubber feet that go under your audio components to isolate them from vibrations. So I get a few hits for Vibrapods, but at the top of the results screen, it displays "Were you looking for vibrators".
No, I wasn't looking for vibrators. I recognize that search engines may return adult or porn content links from time to time, but Live is now suggesting porn links? It's back to Google for me.
useless piece of crap is??? I signed on to myMSN after I saw this, and as far as I am concerned MSN already does everything this F*&%$#G piece of S%$T does. As a matter of fact, it does is better, and more efficiently, but I STILL rely on my personalized Google page as my primary source of personalized information. I would even prefer Netvibes to this.
Does anyone else find it interesting that this is being marketed and branded as "Windows Live", rather than "Microsoft Live"? I mean, it's obvious that it's going to be built into the next version of Windows as the default search tool, but it's not as if you need Windows to be able to use it. My guess? Microsoft is going to start rebranding *all* of their products as "Window x" rather than "Microsoft x", and then discontinue support for anyone using anything other than the latest version of Windows.
It's Google News with an extra side order of suck thrown in.
So heres my objective opinion:
Pros:
The site is very pretty.
The search results seem on par with google.
Good Domain name.
Cons:
Too many fancy UI features. Ajaxy-whatchamacallits all over the place just annoy people, and rarely help productivity during searches.
Seems to be some weird post-backs going on, that keep my browsers back button from taking me where I'm trying to go. That's unacceptable.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
This seems to just be MSN search re-skinned, same results, same crap. It is also slower, the search results come up in a box that is infuriating ly too small and slow to respond, this crappy effects were pretty bad too, smooth scrolling with an irritating scroll thing, that looks like it has been stolen from picasa. Don't get me wrong I'm not some kind of MS basher or OSS evanglist but seriously this is worse than the standard MSN search. Google I believe is sooo much better.
At my current job (small pharma company), there are some very smart people running HR. Company dinner every Tuesday, breakfast every Wednesday, late afternoon buffet on Friday (including wine, not just beer). We get bread and fruit in the morning and cookies in the afternoon. The coffee machine has a zillion flavors, and the tea selection is nothing to sneeze at. The company throws various events throughout the year (picnics, races, party at a casino). I don't have to worry about people looking over my shoulder and my hours are somewhat flexible. There are 6 federal holidays, 10 days for Christmas, and 19 days that can be used any time.
It's in a company's interest to keep their employees happy, unstressed, and wanting to come to work. That's how to put out good projects.
My "Linux vs Windows" search yielded plenty of sponsored links to "Compare bargain prices for Linux Vs!", which is - amazingly - even less relevant than Google's ads, which at least link to things somewhat related.
I think I'll be sticking with the Google site, but thanks anyway!
It's a little gadgety, but it's still quite impressive.
The customizable home page is well done, with a way to customize the columns that Google does not have (and I've oft wished they did), and the ability to add multiple pages which I could easily find a use for.
The "local" maps are generally well implemented. They show significantly more map than Google maps and the 'zoom' effect keeps you from losing your place easily when switching zoom levels... sure you have to wait for it to load the first time, but so what?
The zoom on "images" is nice too, though there are some quirks when you actually try to load a page that an image is on that I don't care for, but whatever, it's all new and I'm sure they'll fix the bugs in a relatively intelligent way.
Any loading problems people have had probably relate to it being new and slashdotted. I'm not having any issues with it at the moment (using a gecko-based browser on Linux).
Whatever, it's very nice. Half the complaints about it would probably magically disappear if it was a Google product anyways.
As much as I hate to say it (and hate to see it), Microsoft is making some big moves on the web and with Vista and they're going to have a pretty damn nice suite of tools available when Vista actually launches. Micosoft is doing a pretty good job of keeping Apple and Google from conquering their respective domains.
Now, if Apple would just buy Google (or visa-versa, or merge, or something) then *that* would up the ante quite a bit.
When I try to type "/" (to start Firefox's vi-like quick find feature) it puts the "/" in the search box and won't allow the search to function normally. Unforunate.
Based on this offering? Yes, it really does look like MS doesn't have what it takes to create a great search engine.
Should I expect to see a dialog box that says, Windows Live is updating your personal settings everytime I connect?
I did a search for "linux". Got relevent results. Did a search for "microsoft sucks" and got Microsuck.com. Will they replace google? Not today. But they're finally off to a decent start.
/me looks in the upper right corner of his browser to the search box.
Yeah, browser search box > *
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
(This alone is enough to kill it for me)
Take your favorites along with you. 1 set of bookmarks, any computer you go to. I've been emailing google for at least 6 months telling them they need to do this. MS probably intercepted my mail, right? Adarn
First there's the announcement that IBM Germany are giving up on Microsoft, next there'll be the one where Microsoft decide to 'migrate away from prohibitive MS products'. Or something (one up for imagination!).
Well teh moderator throught you were insightful- but I guess I remember the 90's too well. I am in my late 20's, and watch all those companies that had foosball tables in the lobby go under. So perhaps I am prejudiced by facts.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Did anyone else notice this in the source??
/* normalizes ie and ff, else ie sees an additional top margin */
document.write("");
Seems they have the same problems the rest of us have in building sites that actually work in IE...
Be Bold! BoldEverything Interactive
I searched my name. Live Search 28 results. Google 6,350. I did it in "s and my name is uncommon.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
So here is my dilema, I use Google for EVERYTHING. You call me and I don't recognize the telephone number I will Google it. I need tracking information from UPS or FedEx I just Google it as well. Until Micrsoft becomes this ubiquitious I don't see myself using their search engine.
"Live" is at least another powerful search engine to check against Google bais.
Top search result for "failure" under Google:
Biography of President George W. Bush Biography of the 43rd President of the United States.
www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html - 25k
Huh? Funny yes, but how can this be an accurate search of "failure"?
Top search result for "failure" under Live:
Failure Magazine Interviews, articles, and commentary on the unsuccessful in arts and entertainment, business, history, sports, science and technology.
www.failuremag.com
This at least makes some sort of sense.
I think one test of the search is when your looking for something you ALREADY know and see if ther are any surprises.
I own a burger joint and I regularly do Google Searches to see what is being written about it.
The same search on Windows Live Search (WLS) yielded marginally better results; that is to say the 1st 44 or so hits on WLS were all 100% about my business while with the Google search (there wasn't # listed and I didn't count) there were about 30-35.
In both cases there were other links to stories about my business but they were intermixed with "stories" about other people & places.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Still the same hopeless page ranking. For example searching for spyware gets the same spaming site on the first 8(!) results, while the most popular removers - spybot and ad-aware are nowhere to be found. Compare with Google or Yahoo. Working on GUI and look'n'feel is good for users, but when the underlying application sucks, there is really no help.
People who like this sort of sig will find this the sort of sig they like.
You can't download IE, you have to buy it with Windows.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
...psychic's. Google's academic result versus MS's commercial result (photo studio) is a company policy. The search results are based on algorithms, however they arrange the importance of (meta)data is reflected in their search result. I'm not sure if Google's method of displaying commercial ads along the right is a trademark/patent but ads must be displayed to generate revenue, if they are not displayed outside of the results they will be displayed within.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
As an aside, does everyone else get the weather forecast for LA in the lower left corner? I'm on the opposite coast so maybe it's related to where the servers are rather than what IP you come from.
I get Start, LA weather forecast as well. But if you check Google's personalized homepage without logging in, it's Happy, TX. I live in EST so I think that they just picked cities with interesting names. I think everyone else gets the same results for weather forecast locations.
Recently a site was launched shorttext.com (disclaimer - no relation to the site) ... it got dugg and was blogged all over. Now if you search for "shorttext" on live.com and google.com, live has it as the first result and lots of blogs which mentioned it as subsequent results....whereas there is no trace of it on google.com
Theory is that google will eventually pick it up in its next sweep but live.com is much faster in crawling the web.
I can't middle-click to open in a new tab in Firefox, either. That's how I do searching: middle-click the results into a new tab so that I can easily get back to the search page. That's especially handy when the linked-to page does something unpleasant, like redirecting that confuses the back button.
I tried using my trusty centre click in Firefox to launch the link in a new tab and it won't respond.....
Pros
-The interface is pretty
-The image search interface is really pretty
Cons
-The search takes a long time
-The interface itself is slow as crap
-The results range from bad to terrible
-While the interface is pretty it's barely usable in many cases
--For instance, there's no good way to search for anything but web pages from the front page
--While I like the image preview type thing after an image search, I hate what happens after clicking on the image itself...you get the page in a frame and the image you clicked on isn't really shown anywhere until you ask for it, and then it just pops on top
--The slowness makes all of this standout even more
I can't middle click results to pop them in a tab in Firefox. Utterly worthless. Can't search the page with CTRL+F. Rubbish. s/n ratio on a search for used motorcycles is pretty crappy. I'm getting more detour squatter/spammer pages than on google.
The complete lack of the ability to middle click the links in Firefox is what's really chapping my ass though.
First time going there on a win2k machine and it crashed IE. I think I'll stay with google for a bit longer.
"brix_zx2, What is your sole purpose in this forum!?!?!"
"To do whatever you tell me MODERATOR!!!!"
Remember this is a beta and right now everybody is trying to use it. But it shows potential. In 1 minute I had set everything up the way I wanted it with feeds from Slashdot , Engadget , Wired , BBC World ,my Hotmail inbox and the weather prediction for tomorrow.
The search results are pretty good , I even found a user review of a product that google wasn't able to.
And to all the people saying "you can't see how far down the list of results you are": The list doesn't end. ( well atleast for a couple million search results down the line.) The results aren't divided in pages. Numbering of the results would be usefull though.
All in all I am suprised at how nice everything feels.
-- TRUST ME! I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!
Have you every tried to go to googles website with javascript turned off. Everything degrades properlly and is still usable. Try to use this search with javascript turned off and it utterly flounders.
I don't know about the results but at least it looks like a next-gen search engine
Fortunately, I came prepared for browser discrimination, so I loaded IE into OS X... After it saying that it was "Loading..." forever with Safari, I decided to try IE.
All it did was make a fraction of the Microsoft logo in the corner. I didn't even see a search box.
I probably could upgrade my version of IE... But it isn't worth it...
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Is this their "Google Killer" ? because if it is - the interface feel's horrendous. Its slow and sluggish - and it seems like a classic case of using AJAX for the sake of using AJAX. That scrollbar is horrific. V.Nasty.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
n/t
no, they copied if from Apple's iSync.
Booo ! Microsoft ! You have really exceeded your stupidnes by not supporting non-windows platforms.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The news feature needs a lot of work before it's going to be able to compete with Google News. I did a quick search for "Israel" and got 50+ stories all about the same thing, referencing comments made yesterday about the new PM of Palestine being a potential target of Israeli security forces. Google news is smart enough to give me ONE result on this story, and links to the 695 "related" stories (MS take note on this feature). The end result is that I get to see multiple stories about different topics, all on the first page. Of course, since MS can only seem to cram 4 results per "page" it doesn't really matter much anyway. I also noticed that all the news links in Google seemed "fresher" than the Live results, in that they weren't all from at least 8 hours ago.
Also, it's interesting how they chose/stole the same colors from Google, but I guess that's to be expected.
End result is, I won't be switching off Google anytime soon.
If you enter a normal search string in say "Google" it will list the results correctly. Next enter in an odd character like a "!" (without quotes) or "~" and it will say it didn't find any results for ! or ~. Now type in a normal search string (doesn't matter what it is) like "AJAX" and it will sit on loading and never return the results. Tried it with Google and it handled it just fine. You would think they would have a little better search exception handling even in the Beta version.
Absolute positioning placed thier search bar and logo inside of Google's top frame. It's unuseable :D
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Two browsers, the latest Firefox and IE running side by side. The IE window loads, Firefox doesn't. Just get the endless Loading... animation. Running any browser on my Mac, it never gets past the loading phase.
Piece. Of. Junk. Only Microsoft could create something that displays text search results in a browser fail to function.
Maybe it wouldn't be so damn slow if they linked to http://search.live.com/ instead of the live.com homepage which just happens to have a search bar on it.
:-P
Tried the search engine....I prefer the old MSN/Google/Yahoo approach to the layout (multiple pages). Scroll wheel is kind of jerky with this. Doesn't feel right...probably just me
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I guess I remember the 90's too well. I am in my late 20's, and watch all those companies that had foosball tables in the lobby go under. So perhaps I am prejudiced by facts.
I lived through the same thing. Have you ever heard that correlation is not causation? This is a perfect example. Sure lots of companies with foosball tables went under, but so did plenty without. It was not the relaxed atmosphere that killed them, it was the fact that their business plans were junk. Some of them were just ways to funnel venture capital to "the guys" and have some fun. Some were incompetent people who thought because something was "cool" it was profitable. Google is not going out of business, they are making money, and so are we. Any HR drone who does not think keeping employees happy is a important concern is an idiot. Stress and poor working conditions lead to turnover, medical problems, and people motivated to do the least work possible. If I come in on a sunday to get something from the office, or grab some papers so I can answer someone's question I'm proving that keeping me happy helps, because I am there on a sunday. It is not unusual for someone else to be in the office on a sunday either. People pull all-nighters, not because they have some manager breathing down their necks, but because something really interesting is happening or because they want to make sure a customer is happy. Of course having some real stake in the company helps to motivate people too.
...of conforming the search engine to their other applications.
1. It has a cluttered, busy looking screen.
2. I find myself waiting while it loads.
3. It freezes up with displaying an animated "loading..." message.
4. It has more annoying bells and whistles than actual functionality.
5. A person with the very latest in hardware (AMD64) with invested time in the latest patches says "it works!" They did a great job of making something that has all the attributes of their other wildly successful products.
Now if only they can shut down user-choice by forcing people to use their search engine rather than Google buried in a "click to accept" license condition of Vista.
They still just don't get it. The main reason why Goggle became so popular so fast was because of the relevant search results and the simple web page. That scroll bar is so dumb, and so in the way.
I prefer Google's search interface - simpler is better, I don't need all those bells and whistles. However, I am very happy with Live's search results - my softcore porn site shows up in the first page for "nude girls", whereas it's nowhere to be found in Google's results for the same phrase.
I typed "Microsoft sucks" and after 3 minutes timed out!
Yeah tell me they aren't bias.
At the bottom of the page there is a very nice link
"Didn't get the results you expected?Help us improve "
I'm sure MS will appreciate all your constructive feedback (no sarcasm).
Who knows, it might be more useful than bitching about it here!
I don't know what's wrong with you people. I would have thought that both search engines would retrieve the most "relevant" result by far, namely that broomstick-wielding Star Wars Kid.
"The usefullness of a search engine is directly proportional to its ability to discern the relative probability that each page matching your search terms contains useful information. Every major search engine uses its own set of heuristics to decide how useful a page is, and to what extent it is related to the words that it contains. It's not only reasonable to expect that a search engine can guess which, of the millions of pages may match your query, you're looking for, but it may be the only reason search engines are useful at all."
Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to search a whole planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
I'm gonna comment on a different issue. I'm guessing this failure of live.com has to do with microsoft's marketing team more than its developers. I'm betting their developers where screaming foul when the marketing department wanted all this ajax/javascript/flash (whatever mumbo jumbo is preventing me from seeing a simple search page). That is how I see microsoft personally. A team of brilliant people leaded by idiots in management. If microsoft could consentrate on loosing the management overhead, I'm betting we would see strides in innovation and alot less pointless eye-candy and lock-in. Microsoft stopped being fun when sales became the beginning and the end of their projects.
It thinks the best place to get news from is Google.....type "news" in the search engine and http://new.google.com/ is the first to appear.
I did an image search for Karina Stenquist, the host of the mobuzztv vlog, and all I got was picture of Lala from TikiBarTV and one of Amanda Congdon. Nothing about Karina.
At least they provide pictures of hot chicks when queried for a hot chick, but I'm expecting a bit more accuracy!
BTW, Google image search doesn't provide anything...
mozilla children okay, but safari just sits there and goes "loading, loading, loading, loading, loading, loading, "
curiously, it's a lot better looking on a mac running camino than it is on an xp machine running IE... go figure...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
It says "Find anything using the new Windows Live Search!" So lets try
my car keys
And the answer is
Are faeries playing with my car keys?
Mystery solved.
Tried to use it and Internet Explorer kept crashing while loading the page. I'm very impressed.....
I tried doing some image searches.
1. Apparently it just keeps loading and loading and loading image thumbnails. Hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. All on one page. Madness. With no good quality way to flip back and forth between image 10 and image 500, except by slogging through 11-499.
2. A Google image search result will tell you right up front the size, dimensions, and originating page for an image. You can also set it to filter (roughly) by size, so you don't get huge or tiny results that are useless to your needs. With MS, you only get image info if you hover over the individual image (and even that doesn't work reliably). So instead of being able to scan a page and immediately know the useful result, you have to hunt and peck individually and hope you luck across a useful one.
Why Windows Live? Is it only for Windows? Is it referring to the OS line and not the company?
How is this different from MSN's searching capabilities? Different interface, yes, but why not just modify their current engine instead of creating a new one?
And lastly, why make an entirely new search engine when there are (good) alternatives out there? Why not try to better your current products? This applies to both Google and Microsoft, in a way. They have oodles of nifty products, but stop putting out new ones and farking fix your already introduced.
Ok, so this may be a rant / flame, but come on M$. Did you even try here?
w .live.com%2F :eek:
w .google.com%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doct ype=Inline
You claim your page is XHTML1.0 Strict, but can't even get it to validate:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fww
250+ HTML errors on 100 lines of code? Is the OS the same way???
Google on the other hand doesn't try to be anything. Just the simple little "search engine that could".
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fww
(50 Errors)
You make it impossible to use without javascript where as Google is non-JS friendly
You make it without regard to US Section 508 / WAI standards (I guess you don't care if the Government uses it, you just hand over all your search records anyway). Not that this is really a #1 priority at google, but at least it's usable for non-JS users and is all text (html)
You offer an over-engineered design.
I don't see this taking off in the near future. Need many MANY improvements.
I like the interface. I haven't used it much -- I might get tired of it -- but my first impression is that it works pretty well. (I have a pretty powerful laptop though.)
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I just get a "loading..." here.
Is my browser unsupported? Is the site overloaded? Did their server cluster crash?
It doesn't say.
Can't say that was a good first impression, but it's 110% typical Microsoft.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I searched for "windows live sucks" and it crashed my browser. No joke.
Anyway, I cannot see why anyone would want to use this over Google. Even if the results were on-par with Google, the user interface is enough to drive you crazy.
I realize that nobody will read this, but I'll post it anyways. I was using the whole thing seeing what features M$ was offering. Overall they offered nothing new. Then I stumbled accross the Custom Domain service, where I can setup email for my own domain. That awesome, seeing as how I've never been able to use the email address for my domain.
This is an entirely new an good service from M$ and I will be using it (unless I find something better)
023AD01("Child", "Evil");
IE crashed when I loaded it
That's not true. I tend to get a fair few people clicking on the link in my sig, coming to my site via slashdot, and I'd say at least 70% of them are using Firefox. So either Firefox users are more likely to click links (I doubt it), or you're wrong.
There was no link anywhere on the live.com main page that leads to a tutorial of searching syntax. On experimentation though, it did have similarities with Google search syntax. I've tried the following with success:
Using "site:live.com" gave me some interesting results.
The UI is quite innovative. Though I highly doubt I would be using it much, as it would force the usage of Javascript. It broke in less than 5 minutes. The site had to be restarted with a new tab when it crashed. It happened when the back button was pressed on the image search. The local search was a disaster. Deer Park couldn't render it properly and the map was spilling out all over the place.
Overall it seemed to survive the slashdot effect (Netcraft says it runs on IIS). It does what it says on the tin, a search engine. Its buggy and its slow but it did find the things I was looking for in about 10 min of usage (Apart from the help on searching syntax.). Also it has at least has some crude advanced searching syntax. However its not something that I would use heavily.
I get the worst response when using IE for Mac, only got half a graphic loaded and nothing else.
It did work with Firefox for Mac and Linux.
Did not work with Opera, Camino, Safari, or Seamonkey.
I guess I have no right to complain though because I don't run Windows in any way shape or form.
Dosn't work in Opera. Ok, that happens. Tried (the latest) IE. IE spits up an error message ("web undefined") and then takes forever and doesn't do anything.
Do they actually try this stuff?
How freaking hard is it to have one searchbox return a page of text? Or did they misspell "lie.com".
Somebody regster "dysfunctinalpieceofshit.com" and alias to to live. Truth in advertising.
Need Mercedes parts ?
It's like Google maps. As you scroll out, it loads adjacent data and makes it look like you have the everything accessible, while it's really just loading things as needed.
I'm not sure if that's the dynamicness (is that a word?)...
Yes, don't worry, it's a perfectly cromulent word. Here's an example sentence: "The dynamicness of the Live search engine embiggens its search ability."
(BTW, am I the only one who has added 'cromulent' to their spellcheck dictionary?)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I've got the NoScript extension so this site simply does not work for me. I don't even get the input box!
Google, on the other hand, works perfectly well without JavaScript enabled.
Advantage, Google...
Why? What value do 12,000,000 clones of a Wikipedia article add? Does the world really need to know about every permutation of Google AdSense applied to GFDL data?
The pages provide no value in and of themselves.
Knowing the existence of them may proove valuable to some. What good would Google be if they couldn't use thier own tool to find cases of abuse?
Again, I don't really pay attention to the little number of results found, just to the top results themselves. As lond as those 12k items come after what I'm looking for, who cares?
I mean the only bother this can be is if you're placing cash money bets down on a Googlefight.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree. While the search engine behind the UI might well be interesting, the UI in its current form is hideously painful for me. :I Mouse wheel does not work in the search results 'box' for scrolling, when I go back to the search results from a site, something in the page is generated dynamically, the box does not appear to scale horizontally and thus takes a ridicuously small amount of available space, it managed once in a span of few minutes to completely hang my Mozilla... I do not remember any search engine so far making such a painful impression in so short time.
Hopefully somebody gives the UI an overhaul, preferably sooner than later.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
...Or maybe you're well now.
I searched Live for google...some 63 million pages. I searched Live for Microsoft...85 million. Looks like they've already won!
Doing my first search a number of recent searches shows up. I am pretty sure I never used www.live.com before and I am not quite sure where what search engine I have been using... most likely not msn...
Any ways, if I remember correct cookies left by one domain is not accesible by others.
A wild guess is that it might have to do with firefox's search field from the toolbar but I might be off...
One of the new "features" of the latest dynamic web page design is intelligently detecting your region and setting your language accordingly. Which means that if you're in Japan, you will see the page in Japanese, whether you like it or not. Sure, I can read some Japanese, and I need the practice, but I want the option to set it into my mother tongue. I don't think this is asking too much.
Honestly, this is an example of bad programming. You're supposed to always include an override in case (gasp!) your software should not do what the user wants (one of the dumbest places I've seen this particular practice: the Apache web server documentation. I have to change my operating system's localization settings in order to read it. Talk about inconvenient.)
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
It happend again. Why would any designer in their right mind choose two different layouts for scrollbars on the web search and the image search. For some reason it reminds me of some menu items hidding in MS Word...
Why?
Way to go Microsoft, this time you've aimed for the foot and shot yourself in the nads.
An important consideration in naming things now is the uniqueness of your name, and thus the ability of people to search for it. If you use a common word, you will be buried under a ton of irrelevant material already existing, and you may even have issues with trying to advertise your product due to a trademark with the same name existing in another domain (which doesn't preclude you from naming your product that, but can be an annoyance). This is why I intend to name my next algorithm "Oltor the Defiler" regardless of what it does...
Yeah, it's a bit weird, but at least searching for XFree86 works.
Oh, and you can link to results pages, despite it being AJAX - they've taken the obvious tactic of (ab)using ANCHOR tags to keep track of what page you're on. (Not sure how portable this is - I meant to test it on a few browsers a while back when I realised you could do this, but never got around to it.)
Not on my search.
Same problem here ... I've tried on multiple browsers ... for both ... ... "Loading..." ... ... Loading
Opera, FireFox, and Internet Explorer
simple and more difficult queries
and all I get is
5 Minutes later
And I was actually curious as to what is
so special about their new Search engine
My answer so far? Nothing...
This product on the surface seems like more like a step back than step forward in terms of being easy to use. I agree with many of the problems people are concerned about and it will have to be watched for the next few month. I have long been a microsoft fan and like many of their products from vs .net to office 12 and vista (though still disappointed) and I do think I have a high bias against linux mainly because development is slower due to linux IDE issues. Nevertheless, I can't help to express how big of a disappointment this was flash is good but it all depends on the way you do it, if you can't do it correctly then stick with html or css. Furthermore, I have problems focusing on some of the research results, probably due to a conflict in color choice of GUI design or just me. However, the scripting looks familiar to the html/javascript behind the scenes of a variation of aspx, so I don't think they are really using ajax. Lastly, I am not sure how likely I am to customly design my home page, seems like a lot of extra stuff that I don't need. Whatever, they will do what they want to do, as long as their c# and .net frameworks are good I will continue programming in c#.
Now, I don't mind applications which use AJAX stuff as long as it benefits the overall user experience. This live.com offering seems to have it there just for the sake of it and in the process it breaks some UI rules (I have no idea how far down the list I am in the search results, the 'scroll' thing offers no feedback whatsoever, and I can never understand why people think the browsers own vertical scroll bars are ugly and then proceed to put their own scrollbars into the middle of the page somewhere) and it makes the page sluggish.
As I like to offer suggestions along with criticism, here's my steps to a Google killer:
To accompany this list, here's an obligatory Einstein quote:
Even if they matched the capabilities of Google in terms of design they could improve the usage of the site through people just using the 'default' search address, much in the same was as people use IE as it's the web browser that comes out of the box.
Now, Microsoft have the personpower/raw money available to address these. If they offered me a job to do it, I'd probably turn it down as I'm allergic to flying chairs.
As for improving the experience for the web site owner, they could maybe provide a service where they provide search statistics for your site across their search engine so that you can improve your ranking somehow. Maybe provide a collaboration portion of the site, so if you as a user find a highly relevant site from your criteria you could manually assign a rank to the result.
Task Mangler
It can be two things!
This scrollbar is horrible, it violates the fundamental usability of a regular scrollbar which is to easily let you scroll through a list while giving the user feedback as to where her or she is on the dataset.
It's a nice UI metaphor for navigation that gives you easy feedback on how much data you are seeing and where you are at. With this scrollbar, it's confusing to determine your position and easily snap it to the bottom or top of the results, this is what happens when you put a 1 million results in one list.
Horrible, horrible, horrible.
- sigs are for wimps.
This "drag bar" is a usability nightmare.
... nope it doesn't. Not consistent.
First of all, it looks like a scrollbar, second of all, it's nothing new as you seem to imply. This UI component is similar to the one used in Picasa and it's just as bad if not worse. You don't want to represent a virtual list of thousands if not MILLIONS of results as a single scrollable list, plus you don't want to use a component that is going to confuse users thinking it's a scrollbar to clumsly navigate using it.
What if I'm skipping around pages? I'm at the end of the list and I want to go back to page 1? I have to hit the "HOME" key, but there's no affordance to remind me of that (I almost never use this key). Does the end key take me to the last result? Let's try it
The page results on webpages at the bottom are not very attractive, and are not useful in my view for other applications, but for an app where you get this amount of results (searches) you need intuitive visual indication of where you are at. This doesn't provide it.
- sigs are for wimps.
...turned to ie6 on xp it loads in a 2-3 seconds.
without it (firefox on linux) it gets stuck at loading...
I guess the next "independant" statistic will say how firefox is slow
and that 100% of visitors is now using ie...
remember OS/2? I worked for IBM at the time.. it didn't last long.. we all ended up going to NT after a while... we got assimilated..
That didn't work. It loaded the page in the current tab.
I tried to use my back button. It went back, then forward to the full page image.
I tried to just go back to the main page by typing "www.live.com" in the URL bar. It gave an empty page.
I tried to exit and restart my browser. There was a Moz process still living that I had to manually kill.
I don't think I'll be back.
I am in my late 20's, and watch all those companies that had foosball tables in the lobby go under.
Interesting point, but Microsoft also has foosball tables, arcade games, Xboxes in the hallways. The problem with those internet bubble companies that you speak of wasn't that they had foosball tables, it was that they never actually did anything that earned revenue, let alone profit.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
no, they copied if from Apple's iSync.
Actually, MSN Premium had this for years.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
webLink:www.live.com/1 /H.1-pdv-2/s0810570875560?[AQB]&pccr=true&&ndh=1&t =9/2/2006%200%3A23%3A18%204%20480&ns=msnportal&pag eName=portal%3Alive.com&g=webLink:www.live.com/&cc =USD&ch=Live&c1=Live.com&c2=en-us&c29=webLink:www. live.com/&s=1024x768&c=32&j=1.3&v=Y&k=Y&bw=828&bh= 572&p=Java%20Plug-in%20for%20Cocoa%3BQuickTime%20P lug-in%207.0.4%3BFlip4Mac%20WMV%20Web%20Plugin%202 .0%3BNPSVG3Carbon%3BQuickTime%20Plug-In%207.0.4%3B LizardTech%2C%20Inc%20DjVu%20Plug-in%206.0%3BShock wave%20Flash%3BJava%20Plug-in%20%28CFM%29%3BJava%2 0Plug-in%3BShockwave%20for%20Director%3BDigital%20 Rights%20Management%20Plugin%3BAdobe%20Acrobat%20a nd%20Reader%20Plug-in%3BFlip4Mac%20WMV%20Plugin%20 2.0%3B&[AQE]. gif?v=3o und.gif?v=3 f g s tyle.css. 020306.0/AtlasBindings.js2 0505.0/AtlasCompat.js0 20306.0/AtlasRuntime.js. js
webLink: intentionally replaced the http to parse easily without active links. Omniweb gives the actual spewage out which is quite extensive.webLink:msnportal.112.2o7.net/b/ss/msnportallive/
webLink:search.live.com/s/live/search_button_rest
webLink:search.live.com/s/live/search_inputbackgr
webLink:stc.live.com/live/css/1.0.6.044/style.css
webLink:stc.live.com/live/img/animated_loading.gi
webLink:stc.live.com/live/img/bubble_arrow_top.pn
webLink:stc.live.com/live/img/logo.png
webLink:stc.live.com/live/themes/1.0.6.044/ocean/
webLink:stj.live.com/live/extern/atlas/bindings/2
webLink:stj.live.com/live/extern/atlas/compat/0.1
webLink:stj.live.com/live/extern/atlas/runtime/2.
webLink:stj.live.com/live/js/1.0.6.044/defaultloc
webLink:stj.live.com/live/js/1.0.6.044/first.js
webLink:stj.msn.com/br/om/js/1/s_code.js
webLink:www.live.com/
webLink:www.live.com/favicon.ico
Atlas compatibility:
[![if !IE]]script src=webLink:stj.live.com/live/extern/atlas/compat
- Mozilla browsers
- Safari
- Opera
- Konqueror
- Lynx
For just a few of the famous onesWhere at least with Opera (8.52 Win2K SP4) no search is possible, just a loading message appears...
But the results with Firefox seem to be pretty good - when searching for 'Schlagzeilensammlung' (the german word for a collection of headlines) my just-in-time generated news / headlines site appears as first entry
[And a search for Windows will return the Microsoft site as first result...]
I lag
wish i had a mod point for ye.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Have Windoz inside. Konqueror just chokes with errors. I shoudn't even tried it. The devil made me do it. Stick to google!
"History is the realm of the true lie." A.Szerb
Ok, first of all loose the busy screen. Why do I need all that other crap to come up if I am just going to do a search. Just do what you do with everything else microsoft and COPY them directly or just buy them out. If you can't beat em Buy em. Second, while I think the scrolling added on the fly search results is cool. The window size is rediculously small, it takes 20 percent processor power to scroll down and it's very slow. I don't know why they would roll out a beta that is in horendous shape and really wasn't meant to be tested yet. What were they thinking, really? If google every rolled out a product or service in this shape they would never hear the end of it. Microsoft, boasting it's google killer will do it and probably get away with it. However, judging by the majority of posts on this forum, they should be rather embarassed. Did they not do a limited beta first?
I want spam! cranbers@gmail.com