Microsoft’s Live Search is now live. So far from what I’ve seen the latest changes to the UI and the search results are nicely done.
In terms of the search results, it appears to be better than earlier beta versions. Take “Tablet PC”, for instance. The results seem quite relevant. I am a bit bumbed, however, that TabletPCPost didn’t make even the first page for “Tablet PC Software.” The results are defintely better than a few months back, but seeing that TabletPCPost has the largest collection of Tablet PC software you’d think it might have at least made the first page. Fortunately there’s a page two :-). If I read the tea leaves correctly here, it appears that links from some key sites has increased in relevance.
The Images search has nicely framed images, devoid of any text until you hover over them or click. It’s the pop-up on hover that got me thinking–how would this do on a UMPC with such a small display. Actually, I was very surprised. Extremely so. In fact, I’ll go so far to say that the Live team appears to have done a terrific job in designing for a small display like that on an UMPC.
Here’s why. First, the hover effect is marginalized on the UMPC. First, if you’re using a stylus, hover or “visit with the cursor” doesn’t mean much. A click will be registered. (Actually you can still click and drag the stylus over images too.) You’ll still see a slight scaling up of the image as you visit an image though when using the case buttons to move the cursor. Because there isn’t much space the pop up with text isn’t rendered. That’s OK, although I bet that a horizontal framing of the text probably would work. The better part is that you can use a slider on the page to reduce the size of the thumbnails. This works very well on the UMPC.
There’s a Scratchpad area on the images page which you can drag and drop images into. No ink annotations though. Hint. Hint. Yes, Microsoft, there needs to be ink support in the browser–all browsers. This would be one more excellent place to have ink. Not only that, imagine if this scratchpad space could synch with OneNote in some fashion. That would be a winner.
The Live Video results page is OK. Although I’m not so sure the relevance is what I look for. For many videos I want to see new content first–similar to the way a news site or blog search would be. A reference of all popular videos is fine, however, I haven’t ever found the reason to search for one myself. There is an exception here. I have been using Google, for instance, to find videos on YouTube. Why? Because I have a horrible time with the YouTube search. Google does a much better job. In fact, I use the web search on Google to find videos because I’m better able to match on text that I know is on the page with the video. There’s more thinking to do in the whole Video search space I think.
Lastly, in terms of the News category on Live Search. Hmmm. The results are intentionally left sparse, which will be nice on a SmartPhone I imagine, however, to tell you the truth I’ve gotten used to the more newspaper-like appearance of Google. I miss it. I miss its grouping of (often duplicate) stories.
Overall, the Live Search team looks like it’s making good progress. The relevance appears to be getting better–although we’ll have to see how it holds up over time. Will TabletPCPost, for instance, make it to the first page for the query “Tablet PC Software”? Will spam pages perculate up?
Oh, and on a similar note, how relevant will the sponsored ads be on the Live pages. In the past the relevance has been way too low. (Even now if I search for “Tablet PC”, for instance, I get generic ads for splise.com, business.com, nextag.com, couponmountain, and dealtime. And the top ad is for Dell, which doesn’t even have it’s own Tablet (although they resell the excellent Tablet from Motion Computing). All these generic ads do is help to bid up the cost of a quality ad to appear. I expect this to improve over time. But in the meantime it means advertisers are paying a spam tax to advertise on Live.