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.

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....

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.

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.

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

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.

Re:Simplicity ???

[Utopia]

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

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.

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.

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:opera and live

[weg]

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

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: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.

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?

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: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: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: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: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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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...