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.

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?

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: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...

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: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...

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.

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.

just AJAX

[everphilski]

Just AJAX, same as Google's customized home [google.com]

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.

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.

Results list is horrible

[Winterblink]

The search results themselves seem fine so the search algorithm looks to be, at least to me, acceptable. But the search results list itself is horrible. There's no scrollbar to speak of, so there's no way to quickly drag up and down through the list. Use the buttons on the right to go up and down by clicking (or dragging for autoscroll), or your scroll wheel, but that's it.

Might be nitpicking, but then again just because you CAN do fancy interface crap like this doesn't mean you SHOULD, especially when it affects the usability.

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.

No middle click??

[Nemi]

I can't middle click on results to load them in a new tab in Firefox. That is the single biggest thing I do when doing to reference search on google. Do search, middle click relevant-looking pages, then check them one at a time since they are all loaded in the background.

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

[Andrzej Sawicki]

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

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)!

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."

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.

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:Hmm

[Shaklee39]

Contrary to what you believe, the majority of slashdot users use IE. Sure they like to rant about how IE is terrible and firefox is superior, but when all is said and done, they use IE.

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 [cornell.edu] 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: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.

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.