Microsoft just put out a press release announcing the release from beta of Live Search and of Live.com in 47 markets worldwide. The release also says that Live Search will now power search on MSN. The changes don’t appear to have gone into effect yet, but they could at any time.
Live is Microsoft’s key play for the future and new company leader Ray Ozzie has been a vocal advocate of Live in particular and web based software as a service in general. Live.com places new emphasis on customization, RSS, blogs, video and other areas of emerging interest. Start.com was to fulfill a similar function, but when Start lost steam last fall the team posted to their blog calling for engineers interested in working on Live.com.
The company says that MSN attracts 465 million unique users worldwide per month. It’s long been believed that the MSN brand was being fazed out and would be replaced by Live.com as the intended home page and search engine for Microsoft’s huge user base. You could say that Live.com has a much more contemporary feel to it than MSN - or you could say that it’s a weak attempt to mimic Google’s sparse interface that ends up looking unfriendly and awkward. Today’s announcement also underlines the strangeness that Microsoft’s new YouTube competitor is being launched under the MSN brand.
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Ozzie’s primary project was integrating Groove and Office 2007. The combined product is named Microsoft Office Groove 2007. There was then an exec summit, Windows Live was discussed, and Ozzie became involved in software as a service discussions such as the Windows Live and Office Live initiatives.
“would be replaced by Live.com as the intended home page ”
Wasn’t that supposed to be http://Start.com ?
The “beta” is now gone from live.com - that was quick…
My favorite is image search, this is REALLY cool and USEFUL. The rest is rather unimpressive, I do not see how Microsoft is going to be able to come close to Google with this stuff. Unless of course they are planning to hard code this Search box into every desktop app in Vista…
Alex
Have you looked at the Windows Live Beta Video Search? No bad at all. At least they are searching most of the major video sites and coming up with very relevant results.
Can you say that for Google’s Video Search? No, Google only indexes what videos are on Google Video. How open and progressive.
The signature of web 2.0 apps is the beta version.
I think the image search still (like Google) largely sucks. Neither have anything on Flickr’s interestingness. Image search needs human input even more than web search. Google is trying to use their little Google Image Labeler game to get ahead by having people tag their images.
If Microsoft and Google want to get better at image search they need to first identify somehow the top photographers shooting and rank their output higher than the results from people like hotelbooker.com. Without a serious social photo network like Yahoo! has with Flickr they are going to perpetually be behind in this area. Perhaps they need to buy or build their own flickr or perhaps they just need to figure out how best to organize and rank the various photobloggers out there (photoblogs.org?), etc. but the current offering at least in image search is subpar.
It needs to go back into beta. Look what happens if you search with no query in the search box for example.
Does this switch effect the ranking of the sites at MSN? What i mean is if the results are now different at MSN for the same search term from what they were, say, a week ago?
8. adam
good one
9. gilbert
i didn’t see any significant changes in ranking for the results on my keywords…
3. david
the results are coming from:
http://beta.search.live.com
still beta?
Is the branding strange, or does it tell us that they are putting UGC video in a “network” environment, as opposed to Live with is a personal start page. just a thought
The reason for sopabox to be under the msn brand is becuase of several international deals microsfot has that still use the msn branded portals and products that will conect with soapbox and the first stage that are msn groups and msn shopping.
I thought something like that would be easily known.
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