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.

Comments

From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[garcia]

All of google's products are Beta and work perfectly.

GMail hasn't been working all that great for me since they introducted GTalk. I had been having laggy service when logging in including errors that I should wait a while and try refreshing. Since then, I have been communicating with GTalk people via bitlbee and have it disabled in GMail (click the link at the bottom). That solved my issues.

While I believe that Google's "Beta" products are generally in perfect working order, I won't say that they are all "working perfectly".

Re:From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[space_dude_27]

If you're going to compare this this with Google then at least be fair and compare it with Google Video ;-)

It doesn't work at all for me in Firefox and when I ty it in IE, I find that it does work but the UI sucks. Great work, guys...

Re:From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[RDW]

Nasty UI, doesn't work properly with the two non-IE browsers I've tried, and rather ironically a search for 'Windows' gives me (as the first four hits, & the only ones displayed by default):

(1) VLC media player for Windows
(2) Windows downloads from The Register
(3) A Windows font survey at codestyle.org
(4) Oracle on Windows

cf Google:

(1) MS
(2) Windowsupdate
(3) windows.com
(4) wincustomize.com

Re:From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[Andrzej Sawicki]

It is not Firefox, methinks. Try disabling your JavaScript blocker. ;)

Re:From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[general_re]

Huh? I just tried it in Firefox, and it looks fine - a bit slow, but the first four results returned for "Windows" are:

1) MS
2) MS
3) windows.com
4) Adobe Acrobat download

Re:From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[andreyw]

Well, it doesn't work in Safari.

Re:From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[rebelcan]

It seems to work fairly well in Firefox for me. They've gone and broken the "Middle Click Opens Link In New Tab" feature in their image search, though.

So much for the "ooo shiny" factor. That's my favorite Firefox feature.

Re:From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[Cal Paterson]

The UI does suck. Who the fuck wants a javascript scrollbar when EVERY WEB BROWSER SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME has a perfectly good one on the right hand side. Redundant? Yes.

Re:From-the-before-the-beginning-of-time dept.

[kabz]

Give him a break, it's Slashdot Rant (beta).

Server is too busy

[Opportunist]

*gasp*

We /.'ed MS?

Gotta be glad now they don't operate out of the UK.

Re:Server is too busy

[farlcow]

I just get a "Loading..." message that keeps spinning. I'm pretty sure its just pre-caching the internet for faster searching.

Already Slashdotted

[Buzz_Litebeer]

Well, that was an interesting product demo, I got the "server busy" message. At least it wasnt blue.

What is up with the scroll bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

That scroll bar is horrible. Nice UI design Microsoft.

Re:What is up with the scroll bar?

[Lewisham]

Agreed. It's impossible to know where you are in the list, I can't use my mousewheel on it, it's not where I expected it to be... pretty much every single mistake Flash designers were making back in the late 90s.

Just because it's in AJAX doesn't make it any more of a good idea.

I guess what they were trying to do was just get the adverts always in view, something that could have been achieved with CSS and web browsers that support CSS properly. Oh wait, hang on...

Re:What is up with the scroll bar?

[kebes]

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.

Re:What is up with the scroll bar?

[Verteiron]

Not only that, but apparently the search engine results aren't "real" links; middle-clicking them won't open them in a new tab (though, strangely, right-click->Open in New Tab does). And the mousewheel works for me IF I click somewhere on the results page to set the focus on it.

Re:What is up with the scroll bar?

[botlrokit]

I haven't had any trouble with my mousewheel in Firefox; it seems to work perfectly on their site.

Re:What is up with the scroll bar?

[Thyamine]

For Firefox, it looks like it _is_ finding the text, but the window isn't navigating to it.

If you type something in (or hit Ctrl-G first, then type) and click on Highlight All, you can then scroll down (manually) and find that it's finding and highlighting your text, but because they're controlling the scrolling it won't jump to your found entries.

On a related note, if you just type text in it defaults to putting it into the search field, which prevents you from auto-text searching on the page.

Re:What is up with the scroll bar?

[pzs]

Also, it fills up your history. If you scroll a lot and then hit "back", it just dicks about in the list of links you've just scrolled through. That alone is enough to make me never use it. Peter

Re:What is up with the scroll bar?

[trevor-ds]

As another poster commented, you can tell where you are based on the text at the top of the results list. For instance, after scrolling down a little on a search for "windows", it says "windows 5-9 (151,200,195)". Arguably that's just as informative as Google when you switch to the next result page.

As for the original poster's question, I'd gather that it's because research shows that users almost never look at a second page of results, no matter how bad the first page is. I assume Microsoft is hoping that this 'infinite result list' will encourage people to look deeper in the results. If my scrollwheel worked with it, I'd see it as a major improvement over the Google interface.

Re:What is up with the scroll bar?

[LnxAddct]

Middle clicking search results is also disabled. They actually had to go out of their way to stop me from opening search results in tabs by middle clicking.
Regards,
Steve

Re:What is up with the scroll bar?

[Lewisham]

Aha, you win. You need to click into or hover over the element to get focus on it. Fact is, I didn't expect to click in that white space just for fun, if I'm going there, I'm going to be clicking a link, not scrolling. It's crazy to expect my mouse to be there, especially on something like a Mac where people generally surf at less than full-screen.

Did they #%^ing kill google?

[Mateo_LeFou]

I searched for "google" and got a long wait, then an error popup

Wow that is SLOW!

[DebianDog]

We /.ed a search engine? or is it this slow by design?

Hmm

[MrShaggy]

MAybe its becuase we are using non-ms browsers?? can you imagine their logs.. stating that the firat 80% was firefox or others?

Still waiting...

[Reeses]

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....

Re:Still waiting...

[alx.slashdot]

Still waiting for it to load....

It worked much faster here but with Internet Explorer. Here's the first search result:

Line: 3
Char: 25698
Error: 'Start.Const.FirstRunMode' is null of not an object
Code: 0
URL: http://www.live.com/

Re:Still waiting...

[LexNaturalis]

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.

Re:Still waiting...

[DaFallus]

Funny, the page loads almost instantly for me with Firefox.

Re:Still waiting...

[jweatherley]

It was pretty fast in Safari too. I got more results back - still think I'll be sticking with Google for now though:

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 <customErrors> tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".

<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration>
        <system.web>
                <customErrors mode="Off"/>
        </system.web>
</configuration>

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 <customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.

<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration>
        <system.web>
                <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="mycustompage.htm"/>
        </system.web>
</configuration>

Re:Still waiting...

[spyrochaete]

I viewed it on a corporate network with IE6 and it crashed the browser twice after about 60 seconds. After it loaded it pretty much appeared to be identical to google.com/ig but all cutesypoo.

Really, the only advantage Live has over google.com/ig is that it has a much better URL. Unfortunately, that's probably enough to win over a lot of the noobs of the world.

Quick test

[smooth wombat]

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

Re:Quick test

[generic-man]

How do you know that 12 million of the Google results aren't just copy-and-paste clones of the first 1.6 million? Lately Google has been returning an awful lot of clone results: Wikipedia, "product review" sites, phony blogs, and so on. Makes me wonder how many useful pages they actually index.

Re:Quick test

[Tx]

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 Live result was just as relevant to your keyword as the Google result. Expecting psychic powers from search engines is a fools game, a search engine can only go on your keywords, it can't know which of the many contexts you happen to be thinking about for those keywords at the time. As you say yourself, one test doesn't mean much, but I don't expect that Google would do much better in the long run with the criteria you seem to be applying.

Re:Quick test

[Aspirator]

You'll have to wait for that answer,

I'm still scanning throught the first 1.6 million.

Re:Quick test

[diegocgteleline.es]

Actually, it probably does - that's what the "personalized search" is about I guess.

In the other hand, why on earth does microsoft thinks that a ajax scrollbar is going to be better than the integrated browser scrollbar? A way to keep the search field at first sight? I'd rather have a search field which moves when I scroll down the page than that thing....also, it's not obvious for users how that scrollbar must be used. How I get more results? I had to spend a time trying to figoure out what's going on there.

Re:Quick test

[pulse2600]

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.

This example explains why people need to be as specific as possible when entering search terms. Maybe if you entered Galen Institute or Galen Medical you would have a better time. Galen Rowell (not Powell, I assume a misspelling on your part) is (was, he's dead now) a very important and relevant figure in nature photography. Most of his work has to do with mountain scenes and mountaineering. As an avid nature photographer, if I simply typed in Galen, I would expect his name to show up in the top 5, maybe even the #1 link, while scratching my head about this medical nonsense.

Think of how many words there are that can refer to a plethora of completely different subjects. One name or word will be significant to me for one reason, while it may be significant to you for another reason. The computer can not and will not ever figure out which significance you are concerned with on its own. You have to tell it why it is significant to you - "Galen Institute" vs "Galen photography".

"Machine will never conquer man because machine is dumb."

Re:Quick test

[MSG]

a search engine can only go on your keywords

I'm glad you don't make search engines.

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.

Re:Quick test

[Orlando]

What ranking can a search engine apply to a search query of one word, as this poster has used?

Re:Quick test

[dabraun]

If you believe the original poster then the search engine should know that you only care about famous uses of the word and that smaller individual people and companies are not as important.

Honestly as long as the first few results as a set cover the most relevant sites I don't think that the order within those first 3-5 entries really matters - and it's highly subjective without having some per-user history to go on.

Perhaps search engines should make a distinction between when you are searching for 'big name' results versus 'harder to find' results - just like they do for commercial (shopping) search, image search, local search ...

Re:Quick test

[npsimons]

Galen Rowell (not Powell, I assume a misspelling on your part) is (was, he's dead now) a very important and relevant figure in nature photography.

And "Galen" (no last name, just "Galen") was a much more important pioneer of the medical arts, who is known around the world.

This example explains why people need to be as specific as possible when entering search terms. Maybe if you entered Galen Institute or Galen Medical you would have a better time . . . As an avid nature photographer, if I simply typed in Galen, I would expect his name to show up in the top 5, maybe even the #1 link . . .

And maybe you should be more specific, especially since the majority of people would recognize the single name "Galen" as referring to the much more well known doctor, and it would be more logical to expect "Galen Rowell" to return the photographer.

  . . . while scratching my head about this medical nonsense.

"Medical nonsense", indeed! You probably wouldn't even be alive if it hadn't have been for Galen! Considering that a) photography and this "Galen Rowell" character have been around for a much shorter time than THE Galen and his contributions and b) medical science is much more relevant and important to all of humanity, you might want to reconsider your position, and possibly review some history before you go telling people why you think "Galen Rowell" should rank higher in a search engine than Galen.

WOW!!!!

[Menotti M]

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.

Simplicity ???

[hexa00]

I guess they didn't get the simplicity we like so much of google

why the hell do we need scroolsbars in the search window!! we have one in the browser.. can't event use page up /down

and so many cheap baby graphics, no wonder it's so slow

I hate it already

Re:Simplicity ???

[Utopia]

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

Already /.ed - Mirror here

[PinkyDead]

www.google.com

I know that's just pure nasty - I just couldn't help it.

Re:Already /.ed - Mirror here

[1evilmonkey]

Even better, google cache http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:_XnZV4pk0FwJ: www.live.com/+microsoft+live&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&c d=3

oracle?

[Soothh]

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? :)

opera and live

[SolusSD]

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.

Re:opera and live

[weg]

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

Re:opera and live

[LadyLucky]

I got an error popup when I tried to search - that's firefox. Live has never worked in Safari.

Broken

[omeg]

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.

/.'ed

[MMC Monster]

Maybe someone should post a coral link. Let off some of the load from MS.

Boobies

[TubeSteak]

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.

miserable failure

[Menotti M]

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

Re:miserable failure

[aftk2]

Heh, when I search for that, I just get redirected back to www.live.com. Sure, I think it's because I'm using Safari - but if that isn't interesting commentary, I don't know what is ;-)

still waiting in firefox

[cmorgan47]

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.

Site Slashdotted

[Iamthefallen]

Try using Googles cache

Trying too hard to be an "application"

[bitflip]

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...

Google's still better

[jotate]

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.

Re:Screw you, accessibility.

[Lewisham]

I think it's about time Microsoft hired a UI team. Or if they have one, get them the hell back from the 10 year holiday they've been taking after Windows 95.

If you've played with Vista and see the magical disappearing menu bars and buttons, (TIP: hiding functionality under the banner of relevance is damn confusing to EVERYONE) you'll see that Windows Live seems pretty indiciative of a company that has no clue what thir UI should be doing.

That said, Google Video could have done with the GMail team's sparkle. Seems like a lot of companies are simply getting it wrong right now.

Lame... As expected

[Kimos]

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.

Relevant to Whom?

[Cranky Weasel]

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.

Loading...

[qcs-rf.com]

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.

just AJAX

[everphilski]

Just AJAX, same as Google's customized home

Complexity wrapper

[ForwardThinker]

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!

why does ms make everything hard?

[noopy]

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?

If they're gonna compete

[solidtransient]

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.

Too lame

[GerbilSocks]

I think Microsoft hired monkeys to build and design this site. It's utter and total crap!

Re:can it get me to google?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Cut the crap.

[Cranky Weasel]

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.

Re:can it get me to google?

[mwvdlee]

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.

Re:Typical MS

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

it's also similar to Apple's OS X loading icon.

has anyone got it to work in Safari? just says loading for me.

Low indexing or high filtering and

[RichMan]

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.

Simplicity

[jorenko]

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.

Awesome

[harvardian]

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.

Prolly WORST NAME EVER

[Ancient_Hacker]

Here's some contenders, and the clear winner:

• HyperCard: People call: "I want that plug-in hyper card". Sorry Maam, it's not hardware, it's software. "Then why is it a card?". Card here refers to like a 3x5 file card. "So it's a recipe program". No, it's more of a free-form user-friendly database.
• Adobe Illustrator '88: Funny, sales dropped off in 1989.

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:

• Their latest hot Windows patches? No
• Live music. No.
• Live links. No, the links could be weeks old.
• Live ANYTHING? Nope.

IMHO The Worst Name Ever

Re:Prolly WORST NAME EVER

[SnprBoB86]

You ever try to search for ".net"? I'm a huge C# and .net fan, but what asshat came up with that name?

Ooh

[BenjyD]

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?

dynamicness

[1u3hr]

dynamicness (is that a word?)

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?

I knew this would happen

[danpsmith]

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)!

It's not a scrollbar

[brunes69]

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.

No, the most horrible Scroll Bar ever!!!!

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

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.

But wait, there's more.... problems!

[babbling]

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.

Firefox quick find doesn't work

[EasyRhino]

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.

Microsoft Is Getting A Clue

[thelizman]

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.

Re:actually... beat this. Google is way more clutt

[lowmagnet]

/me looks in the upper right corner of his browser to the search box.

Yeah, browser search box > *

Even their *own* browser has trouble with it...

[BeBold]

Did anyone else notice this in the source??

        document.write(""); /* normalizes ie and ff, else ie sees an additional top margin */

Seems they have the same problems the rest of us have in building sites that actually work in IE...

Google bais

[bottleknife]

"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.

Degrading.

[loyd86]

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.

Doesn't work on Mac OS X

[freedom_india]

live.com search doesn't work on safari. Seems it is Windows-specific.

Booo ! Microsoft ! You have really exceeded your stupidnes by not supporting non-windows platforms.

Re:can it get me to google?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

safari no go

[circusboy]

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...

vocabulary

[sootman]

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?)