Microsoft has finally updated MSN Live Search. They had planned to announce the updates at the Searchification event, but Akram Hussein, program manager for Windows Live Platform accidentaly released the news early.
Some of the new features include:
- Product searches will include product details as well as product reviews from around the web in the search results.
- A celebrity search page that ranks the current popularity of any given celebrity – their “celebrity xRank.”
- Video previews operated by mouse-over in the search results.
- Relevance, relevance, relevance. We’ve quadrupled the size of our index, which means we can return the right results for your searches. Improvements like enhanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling help us return the best results.
- Speed. Pages load much faster than before.
- Streamlined look and feel. We focused on the end-to-end experience from the homepage throughout the site. For example, search results are now easier to read thanks to work on typography, contrast, colors and spacing.
- More high-interest content. You asked us for more in Entertainment, Shopping, Health, Local and Video search and we’re happy to deliver it.
Once again, we’re feeling good about Microsoft these days because it feels like they are really trying to get back in the game with “actions” not just words! This has been a week of Microsoft news including the launch of Halo 3 which has seen tremendous sales. But I’m getting a little off topic here.
These latest changes should prove to make MSN Live Search even better than it was. The more Microsoft innovates the more attention people pay to it. Now all they have to do is come up with a better name. Saying “Just MSN Live Search It” does not work so well as “Just Google It”.
More Microsoft posts from this week:
