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MSN Search is Now Windows Live

Jay

Microsoft Upgrades Live Search Offerings

After roughly a year in beta, the new Windows Live Search is up and running as Microsoft’s official search engine. With the release of Windows Live Search, Microsoft has made a number of changes:

  • New User Interface – Following in Google’s footsteps, Microsoft has gone away from the busy portal look and moved to a cleaner user interface.
  • Related Searches Link – During the search process, users can click on the related searches link to refine their search query.
  • Improved Image Search – Microsoft has developed their own image search with slider at the top of the result page allows you to control the size of the thumbnails presented, and a menu gives you a number of different options for displaying thumbnails of specific sizes. Chris Sherman, Executive Editor at Search Engine Watch, was particularly impressed by the “scratchpad” feature that lets you drag images to the right pane and save them as a “collection,” which you can name and then recall at any time.
  • New Video Search – Microsoft has partnered with AOL-owned Truveo to offer video search.

“We taking users of MSN and upgrading them to the Live Search experience,” over the next few days, said Christopher Payne, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Windows Live Search. “Live.com is now first and foremost a search destination.” Will Live.com be the next Google? Only time will tell. But they’ve definitely impressed this Internet marketing consultant and many others in the SEM Industry.