Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Windows Live Search goes Live

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the when-giants-collide dept.

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.

10 of 546 comments (clear)

  1. Still waiting... by Reeses · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Still waiting... by LexNaturalis · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm using Firefox and it loaded just fine. The site loaded as fast as Google's site (near-instant, so I can't provide quantifiable results).

      I did a quick search on "Natural Law" because that's one of my favorite subjects, just to compare it to the results on Google, and I found that many of the results were similar. The results were in a slightly different order, but on the whole I'd say that the results for Window's Live were just as viable as Google's results.

      --
      Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
  2. oracle? by Soothh · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. opera and live by SolusSD · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:opera and live by weg · · Score: 3, Informative

      Has nothing to do with Opera... I had the same effect with IE.

      --
      Georg
  4. miserable failure by Menotti+M · · Score: 5, Informative

    Interestingly enough, a search for "miserable failure" leads www.michaelmoore.com at the top, instead of Google's standard George W. Bush biography

  5. Re:Simplicity ??? by Utopia · · Score: 4, Informative

    A more simpler page is on http://search.live.com/

  6. Lame... As expected by Kimos · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:What is up with the scroll bar? by kebes · · Score: 5, Informative

    Agreed. Another problem is that you cannot do a text-search on that page. Even if a word appears (later on in the list), if you do a search for it, you won't be able to find it. In firefox, you usually jump to the search term... but now you can't because it is hidden in some way. So you can't actually navigate the page.

    Also you can't do the whole "I remember it was on the third page of the Google search results" thing. You have to laboriously find things in a long list that you can't scroll through quickly. Why do they feel the need to put a fancy scroll-thing when browsers have that functionality built in? It just makes it run slow.

    There are times when AJAX is helpful (like for smoothly scrolling dynamic maps). Displaying text results is NOT a good time to use AJAX... just use normal clean HTML and everyone will be happy.

  8. Ooh by BenjyD · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?