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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.
look at that little spinning blue LOADING circle at the bottom of the page... looks like they stole it from Firefox. lol.
I gave up waiting. It's probably typical Microsoft bloat. Perhaps I need to use Vista, or the latest IE or something?
Pretty embarassing state of affairs for (one of) the worlds biggest companies. How many people are going to try it once and go `pfft - I'm sticking with Google`?
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 links don't open in a middle-click and they are the same colour even when I've visited the site.
This is basic for web use - especially when I am working though a list of search results. Their designers should be fired.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
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.