Microsoft brings Windows Live Search out of beta mode.
Microsoft brought Windows Live Search out of Beta mode today and also initiated the process of unifying its services. “We taking users of MSN Search and upgrading them to the Live Search experience,” over the next few days, said Christopher Payne, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Windows Live Search. “Live.com is now first and foremost a search destination,” he said.
Microsoft has also pushed the Windows Live Local service out of beta, and added a number of new features to the overall suite of Windows Live services and MSN.
Image search has also been upgraded. Previously powered by PicSearch, Microsoft is now using its own internally developed image search algorithms and index that have been over a year in the making.
A slider at the top of the result page allows you to control the size of the thumbnails presented, and a menu gives you a number of different options for displaying thumbnails of specific sizes. Mousing over a thumbnail causes the image to expand, and also spawns information about the filename, size and location of the image.
Unlike web search, image search continues to use the “infinite scroll” for results, allowing you to see a continuous series of images as you scroll down the page.
But the coolest feature is the addition of a “scratchpad” that lets you drag images to the right pane and save them as a “collection,” which you can name and then recall at any time. The scratchpad , which made its debut with Windows Live Local search, is a very helpful addition to image search, and would be a welcome addition to web search results, as well.
Microsoft has also added its relatively new QnA question answering service, as well as a video search service to Windows Live Search. Payne says that social search initiatives have become a key area where Microsoft feels it can aggressively compete with Google and Yahoo as it leverages and integrates tools like QnA, Messenger and MSN Spaces for its more than 200 million registered users.
For the new video search, Microsoft partnered with AOL owned Truveo due to strong customer demand, according to Payne. He said that Microsoft is building its own video search, however, but did not say when the company plans to roll it out.
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