A Look Inside Windows Live Search

In the Internet search space, Google has set a clear precedent: When you create a service, first you go with what you've got. Then when the bugs seem to have died down, you drop the word "beta" and you call it a launch. Late yesterday, Microsoft dropped the "beta" from Windows Live Search, the culmination of its original Live.com project the company "launched" last November.

In many ways, it's not the same service. Live.com tried a number of various approaches to the basic theme of Internet search, including an AJAX-driven application with customizable content boxes, similar to what Excite.com tried years earlier.

But at least for Windows Live Search, Microsoft has settled on a trimmed down approach that, while cleaner, looks and feels much closer to Google. The "Personalize Page" feature remains present, with a demure little link in the upper right corner, but Live.com no longer barrages the user with an example of how personalization could look.

In previous months, it was personalization that had been touted by Microsoft developers as the feature that will cast Live Search in an entirely new category, separate from Google's homepage. Last June, developers at the company's TechEd 2006 conference in Boston demonstrated rapidly generated Web services, called mashups, which admins could conceivably assemble with minimum effort, based on information services published through an XML-based model developed by Microsoft.

But for right now, the personalization feature is a little quieter, and harder to find than in earlier betas. On the surface, it enables users to choose which of four sub-pages -- "Basics," "News," "Sports," or "Entertainment" -- to attach to her Live.com startup page. Once one of these sub-pages is created, its name appears in the tab bar, which re-emerges after having been wiped clean from the startup page's current incarnation.

By clicking on "New Page," the user creates a blank tab. From there, "Add Stuff" brings up a directory of RSS news feeds and Live.com-associated news services. Some of these items that qualify under the class of "stuff" are "gadgets," and it's here -- at long last -- where users may at some future date find the mashups which were once considered the thing that made Live.com "live."

As some might expect for a "1.0" release, the gallery of gadgets right now is rather sparse. On the other hand, Microsoft has had several months to encourage third-party developers to produce mashups and other gadgets for this particular space, though the results of that campaign don't appear to be reflected here.

We also noted in early tests of the final version of Live.com that, once you create a customized "gadget page," for lack of a better word, the startup page can become mysteriously stark and devoid of content. The search bar, for instance, travels to the very top of the page, presumably to make way for tabs full of gadgets and mashups. If you wait as long as a minute, those tabbed pages will eventually appear.

The final version of the Image Search feature maintains the more animated approach that you'll see not only with Microsoft online services, but also with Windows Vista. A search for images brings up a series of thumbnails, whose size can be changed dynamically using a slider along the upper bar - Google's equivalent is provided by a drop-down box that switches between "small," "medium," and "large" sizes.

When you pass over the Live.com-provided image with the mouse pointer, it zooms closer to you, toward the center, and then becomes framed in an information box which reveals its source, and a link to the page that contains it.

When you click on the link, the thumbnails shift position to a single column along the left side, while the page containing it shows up in a frame toward the right. While Google's functionality is similar, its page elements don't flow from place to place; and some might argue, Google's less animated controls are therefore less intuitive.

Microsoft is touting Live.com's capability to produce lists of "related people" when performing an image search for clearly identifiable names - for example, a search for "Tom Cruise" may be irrevocably linked to "Matt Lauer." While I expected this feature to be limited to the obvious celebrities, I found it surprisingly useful with tests for more difficult-to-place names like "Richard Armitage," which Live.com accurately related to "Colin Powell" and "Valerie Plame."

Image search also features what Microsoft calls a "scratchpad." "Since we know most people searching on images want access to multiple images," Windows Live Search General Manager Ken Moss described on the company's blog on Monday, "this is a quick and easy way to save your results to access them later."

Stay in touch with BetaNews for more about how Microsoft intends to take Windows Live Search further into competition with Google, especially when it comes to such important matters as advertising revenue.