March 9th, 2006 by James Omdahl
Microsoft has announced a new search interface called Windows Live at www.live.com. The interface will go through a period of testing and then be swapped out with the current MSN Search interface. Some of the notable features of Windows Live are:
- a search slide bar that allows you to increase or decrease the amount of information that is displayed in the results (from titles and URLs only to longer text descriptions.
- a “smart scroll” that allows users to search through hundreds of results without having to go to new pages
- the ability to save search parameters as a macro so you can go back and conduct the same searches again or share search parameters with people of similar interests
- support for tabbed web browsing
The features are really pretty cool, however there is still one problem…
The results for MSN Search are still HORRIBLE! Conducting a search in the insurance vertical shows numerous spam or blogspot sites that provide very little value to users.
Leave it to Microsoft to add whistles and bells to a product that is fundamentally broken and then tell us all how great it is.
Case in point, MSN AdCenter - home of the worst user interface in the PPC world. In their latest release, advertisers were hoping that many of the usability issues of the old site would be taken care of. They were not. Instead we got prettier graphs - graphs that really dont mean all that much to PPC advertisers.
So, will MSN fix their search engine before they start promoting the new skin on a broken product?
Im not holding my breath.
I think Jupiter Researchs Joe Wilcox says it best in his interview with the Associated Press:
“Conceptually it sounds good. Execution will tell all.”
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March 9th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
It appears they are borrowing from Google in providing a cleaner looking landing page.
It took me a while to figure out the “smart scroll” as I kept thinking it would work like Excels scrolling system.