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March 28, 2006

Google v. Microsoft: New Search Interfaces

Michael Arrington

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Google and Microsoft both have new search interfaces in beta.

Google is testing a new “green bars” interface to the left of search results, allowing easy linking to search results for the web, images, groups, froogle and local. The green bar is an indication of what appears to be a result count.

Microsoft, through Live.com, is beta testing a new search interface that includes RSS feeds for each search, a much different image search (lots of results thumbnailed) and an “infinite scroll bar” that continues to refresh as you scroll down through results. I’ve written about the new Live.com search here.

Live.com is usable by anyone who visits the site; the new Google search is available only to random users. However, Google Blogoscoped (as well as Digg and Download Squad) have instructions that show how anyone can see the new Google results. Based on this, I’ve had a chance to test Google’s new search interface as well.

In my opinion, both are lacking but for very different reasons. After testing each, Google’s new interface doesn’t seem to actually do much of anything, and Live.com, while inspired, is very poor in actual performance, mostly speed.

Google first. The quick links have been moved from the top of search to the left sidebar. The green bars do communicate total results information, but that’s it. For the majority of searches, the number of results is not important to deciding whether or not to click on the link. All in all, this is a feature that didn’t need to be released outside of internal testing before being scrapped or quietly incorporated. Furthermore, it makes no sense that Google would not incorporate blog search results into the sidebar along with froogle, images, news, etc.

Live.com is a different matter. The image search is excellent in that a very large number of results appear on the screen at one time. There are also more search results than on MSN search, and each search has a RSS feeds that can be added to your Live.com home page with a single click. Finally, the infinite scroll bar is a great way to save clicks to further results pages for deeper searches. But, Live.com has unacceptably slow loading times for searches, and the infinite scroll bar is extremely slow as well. So slow it is effectively unusable.

All in all, Live.com’s effort is much more creative and head turning than what Google seems to be testing. Others might argue, of course, that Google’s clean interface has served them (and us) very well over the years and needs little, if any, tweaks at this time. As Live.com becomes more responsive and faster, it will be interesting to see if people drift away from Google Search and over to Live.com. Either way, Microsoft finds itself in a difficult position - Google controls over 40% of the U.S. search market v. about 15% for Microsoft.

  • Sphere It

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Comments

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  1. Diego Barros

    March 28th, 2006 at 2:18 am

    “All in all, Live.com’s effort is much more creative and head turning than what Google seems to be testing.”

    Given your love of all things Microsoft, and the negative vibes you give towards Google, would we expect any other result?

    Would lunch with Larry and Sergey help sway your reporting of all things Google? :)

  2. dusoft

    March 28th, 2006 at 2:18 am

    ad Live’s scrollbar: that happens when somebody tries to invent something that had already existed long time ago. why they have their own grapic javascript scrollbar, when there users are accustomed to the normal one in browser?

    Microsoft - shame on you, learn some basic principles of usability.

  3. Razvan

    March 28th, 2006 at 2:26 am

    On Google: ok they show green on gray the percentage of the conatined info BUT what the hell is the unit of mesurement? 70% of WHAT? That’s quite a stupid bling bling pointless and useless.

    On Live.com: pretty sweet from eye candy and technical point of view but in the same time pointless because it breaks classical navigation schemes that users have. How am I supposed to give someone a link to page 4 of results? By saying go there and scroll 4 times?

    In my humble opinion none of this tries will make a stable public release. Is just a way for some tech/IA guys @ Microsoft&Google to show smthg to their employeer

  4. Fred

    March 28th, 2006 at 2:36 am

    I’m not seeing an image search on live.com. Is it a USA-only feature or something?

  5. Alastair James

    March 28th, 2006 at 2:38 am

    Hmmmmm… not impressed by Google’s effort. Wow, now I can see the ratio of pages/images/groups etc… Not really that useful as if i am after an image I would search from images anyhow. Could even confuse alot of people…

    Whilst I am not a fan of the live.com site, I cant help thinking that Microsoft’s dedication to making live.com look like a desktop app is interesting…

  6. ipearx

    March 28th, 2006 at 3:20 am

    Re. “Furthermore, it makes no sense that Google would not incorporate blog search results..”
    I’m not sure having a separate search feature for blogs is warranted. A blog is no different to any other web site or page. Really, what’s the difference between a blog, and a news section on someone’s website?
    The other things google has special searches for, are types of *content*, such as images, products or news. What use is searching one type of publishing system used?

  7. Razvan

    March 28th, 2006 at 3:28 am

    @fred…no it’s not US only. It’s a separate tab at the top. That’s pretty nice with the zoom effect. Works pretty nice in FF too.

    Another issue I’ve just spotted is if I type anything in the search box and I hit enetr the page just refreshes and is not showing results

  8. sebastian

    March 28th, 2006 at 4:16 am

    Damn - should have taken a screenshot whilst I came across this “feature” (google) a few days ago.

    BTW. I do totally agree with #3 X% of what? Pure nonsense right now. But I would love to hear your ideas on a better google search. Splitscreen? Mixed searchresults?

    Speaking of LIVE.com - did anybody tried the “we-gladly-host-your-email-at-hotmail” feature? I did. Really nice, but two lines of MS footer in every mail you send. Looks unusable to me. Any information of a “premium service” or s.th. like that?

    kind regards,
    seb.

  9. Florian SEROUSSI

    March 28th, 2006 at 4:43 am

    It is a beta search page that Google is testing. You can reach this result by biaising the cookie. But has you noticed no Adsense/Adwords or sponsored links on this beta search results page…Expect some changes!

  10. Ted

    March 28th, 2006 at 5:06 am

    I will echo the comment about blog search not being present. Why is that? Google’s blog search has improved in its scope (but still has a long way to go) but could be ideal for certain types of searches. It would also introduce a lot of mainstream users to the idea of “live web” or blogs in general.

  11. Joe Anderson

    March 28th, 2006 at 5:20 am

    Live.com is looking better for me. However, Google is the better engine.

  12. Jay

    March 28th, 2006 at 5:44 am

    The “infinite scroll bar” of Live.com is actually limited by the search results; so it is finite.
    Google’s interface (current, the new one looks pretty much like the current one with minor tweaks) may actually be more useful that live.com which relies heavily on high-speed internet and may not be suitable for international markets where dial-ups are still common.
    Also, the look-and-feel of live.com in general has an overdose of Crystal SVGs which resembles that of Vista — another design flaw from Microsoft that comes across as a poor attempt to match the incredible design of Apple’s products.
    Live.com will benefit Microsoft though, because the software giant has never been in the services market, while Google is the key player along with Yahoo! here. The change in design/interface for Google may be counter-productive as it will not be viewed as a major overhaul and will do little to improve the existing (good) usability of Google search.

  13. Saul Weiner

    March 28th, 2006 at 6:28 am

    I like the live image search. One big issue with it though is that you can’t use advanced filters to seach for (for instance) large images.

    I wonder why google couldn;t use the bars for relevance?

  14. Sam Davyson

    March 28th, 2006 at 7:19 am

    I don’t think anyone has actually worked out what the green bars mean yet have they? I think Philipp said on Google Blogoscoped that he found a search with zero news items but a green bar next to news. As for ranting about the lack of blog search and other searches then remember that this is not lauched yet. They are still playing around with it. I THINK the final version WILL include blog search. Somehow they are going to integrate this look:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/davyson/85401451/

    which was seen not so long ago for some users.

  15. Mike Jones

    March 28th, 2006 at 7:31 am

    This live.com scrollbar is somewhat strange, when it works its interesting and actually not bad, but many times it seems to hang where you can’t move the scrollbar up/down.

  16. Jason Kolb

    March 28th, 2006 at 7:45 am

    Google really screwed the pooch on this one. When I’m looking for information (prices and images aside), what I’m really looking for is the *type* of information, not where it comes from. For example, if I’m looking for the answer to a problem at work and I want to know how other people approached it, I’m more interested in content that comes from individuals (google groups, blogs) than general Web searches. Google keeps adding more content sources but isn’t thinking straight about how people will really use them. If they just keep adding more “things” to the list, nobody will ever use them and a more innovative company will steal their market share by releasing a product that works more like people’s minds instead of a database.

  17. google user

    March 28th, 2006 at 8:03 am

    Damn it! This google interface was being used on my computer, then i deleted my cookies!!!!!!!!! Argghhh!

  18. Googlist

    March 28th, 2006 at 8:16 am

    As mentioned above, it is not necessarily clear what Google intends the green bars to indicate. An experiment to test this (making use of searches with 0 results that do return green bars) here:

    http://thegooglist.blogspot.co.....on-in.html

  19. Klim

    March 28th, 2006 at 10:01 am

    Can’t say much about google. I never needed anything changed.

    As for Live.com, it’s a bit of this way and that. Yes slow, but I DO like their image search. Not having to click through several pages is great! But as someone pointed out, how the hell are you supposed to tell someone where you found that image? Line numbers maybe? Also no advanced preferences for image size as Saul mentioned is also a bummer. But they have actually made something I have used several times over the past few weeks for once (not having to go to the image page to see the image is a BIG plus).

  20. Paul

    March 28th, 2006 at 10:32 am

    I wish google would just add its Blog search as a tab along with Images, Groups, etc…

    Blog search is more useful than Group search anyway. Groups should be searched seperately… blogs are still at least pages on the web that more similar to a regular web search than newsgroups are.

  21. Jason

    March 28th, 2006 at 10:33 am

    “How are you supposes to tell someone where you found that
    image? Line numbers?”

    Any time Live or Google or whoever updates their indexes, the images returned for a search will almost certainly change. The sequence in which they’re presented will change. And there’s no way to know how often that happens.

    There’s no way to tell your buddy “I did an image search for Glorms and found the photo on page 3″ and have that reference be guaranteed meaningful more than an hour later than you found the image. Never was. (And why would you want to? The image is the important thing, or the search technique, but hardly the location with the search results.)

  22. Klim

    March 28th, 2006 at 10:50 am

    “There’s no way to tell your buddy “I did an image search for Glorms and found the photo on page 3″ and have that reference be guaranteed meaningful more than an hour later than you found the image.”

    Ok, not a big deal, but when searching for images, I don’t save each and every decent one, but try to take note where I found them. And within a certain period of time, this stays the same (yes, I know indexes change).

  23. Jim

    March 28th, 2006 at 11:18 am

    I’ve been using Live image search now for a few weeks. The results are clean, more accurate and I haven’t had any major issues with performance. I especially like that the address updates dynamically so links back into Live always sync up right in the scroll pane. That was a nice touch.

  24. Andy Brudtkuhl

    March 28th, 2006 at 11:33 am

    MSN Search has had results available as RSS for about a year now.

    http://search.msn.com

  25. Julie

    March 28th, 2006 at 2:22 pm

    Dudes, I sent you screenshots of this on March 13. You are slow. I also posted about it on March 14 at v7n. Or does it only count when 50 million other sites start posting about the same phenomenon?

  26. Mark Johnson

    March 28th, 2006 at 4:07 pm

    In order to create a new interface, you must have new data. Current Web search interfaces are all using the same data that’s been available in the index for the past 10 years. In my humble and biased opinion, a sidebar can be useful if you have a good way of narrowing down results, e.g. you’ve created new data by categorizing the Web. At Kosmix, we have been using the sidebar for about a month now to narrow down search results.

    Also check out Google’s interface for certain searches like Cat Club.

  27. Randhir Reddy

    March 28th, 2006 at 5:59 pm

    I guess its for the novice users, who would notice them, and this would help them drive traffic to those links, which, earlier, were not used by great many users. Considering, the no. of Average Joes getting online. This i guess is an effort towards that end.

  28. Thomas Hochmann

    March 28th, 2006 at 5:59 pm

    Nice to see Microsoft is carrying its expertise over to the web - Live.com is the only site to ever crash my Firefox installation. :)

    The new search is very slick though…

  29. Sam

    March 28th, 2006 at 8:05 pm

    I think yo uare dead on about Live. For microsoft you would think they would have made this thing much faster. Maybe the pages are too heavy with content or more likely - they cannot handle the amount of traffic they are getting on the beta site. The image search system is pretty cool - if you could actually stand to sit and wait for it to load. That should be a new standard for virtual page loading soon…

  30. Julie

    March 28th, 2006 at 8:39 pm

    Mark Johnson -

    What is up with Kosmix email? I checked our your site when there was all that hype and the news stories a month or two ago (Ican’t remember), and tried to email several times, but they kept getting bounced back saying that the email addresses you guys posted didn’t exist. IMHO, that’s not projecting a very professional image. :(

  31. John Bokma

    March 28th, 2006 at 9:34 pm

    @dusoft
    “ad Live’s scrollbar… why they have their own grapic javascript scrollbar, when there users are accustomed to the normal one in browser?”

    I guess they use AJAX to update. So it’s not a page scroll bar, but a scroll bar that scrolls through the result set.

  32. jim

    March 28th, 2006 at 11:55 pm

    um, have microsoft heard of section 508? or the DDA? or even, (gasp) web standards?

    havn’t been able to try google, but i’m guessing you at least are able to perform a basic search if .js isn’t available…

  33. ky

    March 29th, 2006 at 12:35 am

    A fast ajax-based search engine (web, image and video), http://askalexia.com

  34. Andrew

    March 29th, 2006 at 7:10 am

    I dont think Google is testing a new interface, just a new look to the site. Do you really think this is supposed to display some grand and flashy new features?

    Microsoft on the other hand completely redesigned and added features to their old msn search (now Live).

    So how can you compare these two?

  35. DraxAx

    March 29th, 2006 at 9:06 am

    Live is only IE-Combatible.
    Google is any-compatible.

    How’s that for a comparison?

    What about access for disabled people?
    Microsoft is so pathetic…
    Their products are only compatible with their products…

    I guess that Live search would ocme into my GNU/Linux desktop only if it was compatible….
    But still Google is my #1 choice - simpel clean interface with good design and very very fast. No flash and JavaScript when searching. It’s all clutter. Output the results first, and then actually format them. Like using CSS!:)

  36. jim

    March 29th, 2006 at 10:06 am

    Boycott Google!

  37. jack

    March 29th, 2006 at 10:22 am

    Live.com is bloatware like everything Microsoft creates. MS is oblivious to why Google is so successful - simplicity. Simplicity also means faster results. Most people will not want 300 search features. Because MS cannot compete on a search results level, they are traying to compete on a search features level. I find it hilarious that a monopoply on a computer OS has it’s head up it’s ass when it comes to the Internet. Thanks god most monopolies can’t compete outside their core market. Another reason MSN has bombed is that all their fake content presented on the first page is actually just infomercials and corporate sponsorships. People see through this shallow scam. You would think MSN would remove this garbage until it can at least build a decent market share. I think they are trying this with live.com but their implimentation is seriously flawed. Vista was probably delayed because they are finding a way to legally force people to use Live.com through the OS.

  38. pacificdave

    March 29th, 2006 at 11:28 am

    @jack: i personally think people don’t see through their bloatware. about half of the people i know have their home page set to msn.com. some even change their start page to msn.com after i educate them to change to Firefox from IE. pretty pathetic…

  39. Kevin

    March 29th, 2006 at 9:07 pm

    Sorry, but Live.com doesn’t have ctrl-f as a web developer that site is completly useless to me, I love looking at stats and finding my position, and if i have to manually find it? no thank you.

  40. Raja

    April 2nd, 2006 at 10:04 pm

    Alt + Ctr + Del + left click on the page

  41. Brent

    October 30th, 2006 at 5:34 pm

    Anyone interested in rehashing this again?

    From a Google user’s perspective, I’d have to say the new improvements at live search and the quality of the results seem to be competitive now.

    Anyone else feeling the same?

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