Microsoft launched a new search service today called Windows Live Search. Chris Sherman does a pretty good write up on it at SearchDay.
According to Adam Sohn, Microsoft’s Director of Global Sales & Marketing PR, both the new Windows Live Search and the existing MSN Search will be powered by the same underlying technology. Chris adds that Windows Live site will focus primarily on productivity, the MSN brand will continue to evolve as a media and content destination.
Some of the features that are noticeable are as follows:
- Sliders that allow you to resize search results, adding or removing information such as descriptions, or in the case of images, making thumbnails larger or smaller.
- A search pre-fetches hundreds of search results that are displayed in an i0frame, allowing you to continuously scroll down a single search result page without having to click to additional pages of results. “For a lot of users, it will feel like infinite scroll,” said Sohn.
- Image Search – this is pretty cool in that thumbnails get larger as you mouse over them. You can also resize them with the sliders I mentioned above.
- RSS Feeds, News and Local Search – there is a tab that will search RSS and XML feeds only. There are also separate tabs for News and Local search options.
- Macros – a feature that lets you customize and save searches to be run again. Chris points out that, “Macros are flexible, easy to create and share. As an example, you could create a Macro that searched for terms across a set of web sites that you specify, in effect, creating your own personalized vertical search tool.”
There is also a new Windows Live Toolbar that offers several features not included with the MSN Search toolbar. Some of those features include phishing protection, pop-up blocking, RSS detection, automatic aggregation to a user’s personalized Live.com home page and tabbed browsing.
Additionally the toolbar also includes technology from OnFolio, a company that Microsoft recently acquired, that lets you save, collect and share snippets or full web pages found while searching the Web.
