I was just checking Windows Live search today and liked its user interface, it allows you to see all the results of a search in a single page and gives a scroll bar to scroll through all the results. As far as the search results are concerned, we can’t say anything now because it is recently launched.

Richard MacManus wrote review of Windows Live Search on ZDNet blogs.

The main features as per him are :

- An ‘infinite’ scrollbar that gets rid of the necessity for paging through results using “Next” buttons. It can deliver up to 1000 results and generates the page dynamically. Yes, all results are on one page! At Search Champs, Microsoft told us their stats indicate only 30% of users click to pg 2 on search results - which led to this innovation. Note: currently there are reports of this causing some performance issues, but I’m sure those are just teething problems.

- Choose your thumbnail size on images - you can use a ’slider’ to adjust the size of image thumbnails, which is useful for focusing in on images. Or making them small so you can quickly scan them.

- Also hovering over any image displays more information - such as dimensions, file size, file name and location. The theory behind that is that it removes a lot of metadata from the frontend. There’s also a “feedback on this image” link, but note that you probably won’t receive a personal response if you send feedback!

- Click-through on an image result creates a frame for navigation in the left - also click “show image” to view full-size image as a pop-up. All done with AJAX.

Feeds are prominent in the Windows Live Search design:

- You can subscribe to results, with the “add to live.com” button (assuming you use live.com as a personalized homepage, which of course Microsoft is hoping you’ll do…)
- Subscribe to feeds, by clicking the “Feeds” tab. Again very useful for live.com users.

Additional tabs give you options to extend your search:

- News tab - similar to Google News, offers search results from selected media sources.
- Local tab - does a search using the Virtual Earth mapping technology.

Read the complete posting here …

Posted in Internet, Software | 

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