Microsoft's Windows Live Search Opens...

Oh great, another abusive MS bot to look out for. That msn bot was bad news

I think it's a good name. Surely you need to provide quality product, service or both to establish a brand name, but you can't have a mediocre name to get started.

From what i have read windows live sounds like very good news... hopefully break the google monopoly...

but i'm based in the UK and apparently can not use any of the windows live services yet including search... though my stats have reported hits from live.com already so i'm optimistic ^_^

thanks for this update. what's it to be used for? a replacment for msn or something built into windows itself?

SearchBliss wrote: Good bye MSN search?

Is MSN working for anyone else today? The search function appears to have crashed....

(Appears to be working now.... possibly problems with windows live?)

it may be working fine now... but it was pretty buggy when it was launched.. it would give different results on different browsers... i.e. i tried to search for something using FF and did the same with IE.. different results!

It is in Beta, so buggy yes.

I assume Windows Live has just launched in the UK as i have finally been able to have look at it... though as everyone says it still has a few bugs... i doesnt work in Opera at all for me...

an interesting start... i notice that it detects your region automatically and influences the results based on that... there seems to be no way around that... in fact i cant find any advanced search options at the moment...

but this seems to be the idea behind Windows Live... due to the new gadgetry and software intergration they can add features at the drop of the hat so i expect it will change dramatically over the next few months...

another thing i noticed is that the "cached page" links are missing in the results... not sure what to make of that....

and i find it difficult to reference how far down the listings i am scrolling through... there is some kind of counter at the top that tells you but it would be much more user friendly to just number the listings...

and the scroll bar isnt very responsive.... a bit annoying...

though the results look very relevant... msn is my prefered search engine and the results in Live are similar but pretty sure they are using a different algorythm...

I was also wandering wether Microsoft is considering creating a new browser specifically intergrated with Windows Live and 'scrapping' internet explorer... i havent read anything about it anywhere but it seems like a logical step for the future...

I look forward to watching the developments...