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61 Comments
- davdav, on 10/12/2007, -7/+17Microsoft looks better. My opinion.
- Daniel591992, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12Looks better, no doubt. But the question is, does it function better? Google is still quicker, more convenient, and easier to use. Microsoft may look pretty, but it is still a tad slow.
- harrisbradley, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I would *personally* say that google's change is an upgrade to the current interface, and msn (live.com) is a complete interface overhaul. Though, I do think msn takes the cake on this, and for Microsoft's sake I'd hope so. If google redesigned their whole interface, I think they could improve it greatly. And there's something to be said about letting you competitors go first, and taking a look at what they did, and how the community reacts.
Just my $0.02 - gargomel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Sorry Microsoft, too slow. When I want to search, I want to search. Give me the ability fast, make it efficient: all the rest is superfluous.
Functionality first.
I also experienced issues with the images button, simply brought me back to the main page. Seems like a pretty serious issue. - phpirate, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Looks don't count for much when you're actually trying to find something. Google still has more relevant results, I have noticed.
- Flankk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"Am I the only one that still uses Yahoo for searching the web?"
Yes. - aluminumpork, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I actually quite liked live.com's search interface. I found image searching awesome. The bigger preview right there were great. The infinite scroll actually ran quite well for me, especially on the image search. I did notice a few issues with it on the regular search though. The whole thing impressed me, didn't switch me, but impressed.
- bleutuna, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I have NO Idea what you people are complaining about.
My computer was built in 2002. The processor's a 2.26GHZ pentium IV, I've got 2 gigs of ram - not the MOST AMAZING system ever by any means. Comcast is my ISP.
Google was google. I don't need to comment on that. Live.com, however, was pretty freakin' cool, results appeared fast (instantaneous for me), and the scroll worked fine.
The biggest issue here is the learning curve and the paradigm shift of going to the infinite scroll bar. Not a concept most people are familiar with, and it's a little off-putting. They DO need 'back to top' links, but other than that, it's pretty damn stellar.
And 'search bar hidden at the top'? What does that even MEAN? Don't we ALL look at the top for the search bar? And since this uses infinite scroll and interior windows for searching, that means its ALWAYS there.
We're just too used to the way Google searches, so when something new is introduced, we freak out a little. I say way to go Microsoft. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Well quit whining and just do it already.
- behindcurtain3, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Agreed, the live.com image search beats google's hands down
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I can run 5 search on Google in the time in takes to load Live. Why doesn't M$ (yeah i used it, as if I care what you think) not understand that people don't care for the shock and awe website. I enter a term, find what i was looking for, thats it! Make it easier, faster, relevent. Live + Advertisements = MSN hompage w/ movable boxes. Google is miles ahead of M$ (suck it).
Google > Ask > Live - Herolint, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I like Google's site much better. With Google's main site, there are only a few things you can do and all of them are brainless choices. I don't have to wonder what each link or button does, it is painfully obvious. Microsoft's is too cluttered. They even have to point and tell you where the search box is, apparently, because it isn't obvious.
While Microsoft's site is more blue and more gradient in an effort to be aesthetically pleasing, Google's site is quick and functional. I don't want my search interface getting in my way and Google's doesn't. From a usability perspective, Google wins hands down. - PhantomaZero, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Looks like Google moved up and Microsoft caught up. Very neat.
- thegsa, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Live.com's Interpretation of Infinite Scroll Is Horrible, if You Drag It, Past The Center, It slows Down and Suddenly "skips" like 8 searches, it's too laggy. B+ On Design Though. Google Is STILL The Best because it doesn't lag and it makes it simple for it to search for any type of file format easily. For Design, it's gonna be a B.
In My Opinion. - forgeflow, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3live.com is slower than google, but I searched for terms that were relevant to MY website. Mind you, my site is signed up with Google Adsense, I have my site registered with Google Sitemap, I've been on the web for ages and used to have fairly good page rank on Google until I had to move my site to a new domain... I put searches in Yahoo, Live, and Google, and guess what - Live delivered my site, top of the list, for every search I tried. Google, most of the time my page never shows at all anymore. Yahoo is about 50/50. So, for me at least, Live is delivering far more relevant search results. To me, lately, Google just barfs up pages full of worthless cut 'n paste blogs or results that are hardly relevant at all.
- Raldikuk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yes, it does work on FF. Goto www.live.com and try it out yourself.
- ernestorocks, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Just tried them both and I think that article was way too nice to Microsoft. I mean Live.com looks beautiful, but it's completely unusable. The search bar is hidden at the top of the page, the images go incredibly slow, the colors all seem too pale. I think that Microsoft would fail huge here, I don't think anybody would pick that over Google's instant page loads just because it looks nicer.
- tsupersonic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Microsoft has really coming along with live and remember it's still in beta, so there is room for improvement. The image search is great, hands down the best I've used so far. They still have to make some progress on web search. There are many other aspects to the site I won't talk about. All in all, it's not a bad site and I think it definitely has some potential,
It's going to be hard to beat Google, since their home page is so simple, and loads faster, but second place isn't bad considering all the other search engines out there. Also, about the loading times, it's not bad at all, they have to improve on it, and it definitely didn't take much (or any noticeable amount) out of my system resources (on a 1.4GHz Celeron M, yes a Celeron, 768 MB RAM). - AngryPenguin47, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Doesn't seem to work properly on my firefox, I do a search, click on images and it just takes me back to live.com. What a piece of *****. And soooo sloooow, geez. LOAD ALREADY!! I know my laptop doesn't meet the winblows vista graphics requirements but come on....
- quokkapox, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Hmmm, maybe that's why live.com also eats 60-70% of my CPU cycles. When it works at all. No thanks, I'll stick with google, which just works, all the time.
- bobslaede, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I really dont like the live.com thing... Why all that "smart" stuff? If i need to search the web, i need it done right away, not all that "loading" stuff, i dont have time for that... Whats with the fancy ajax search? Not usefull, if it was usefull it would be cool, this is just bloaded...
- spxiii, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11. Little blue pop-up notes don't render properly in firefox.
2. The browser's back button is rendered useless.
3. Choppy scrolling in search via custom scrollbars.
4. Clicking the search button without typing in a query results in a POP-UP WINDOW. Ugh!
5. Clicking Page 1 and selecting Delete Page results in another pop-up window that says you can't delete the only page.
6. The method for adding content to the home page is a bit confusing. I was looking through and saw something called Flickr, so I thought it would put put a photo of the day on there or something. Well, I don't know what "P1050724 [more]" is supposed to mean, so I click "read all" for lack of anything more sensible to do. Then my weather widget is gone and there is a vertical column of photos stretching down the page. I am lost on my own homepage.
Not a terribly good design. They took Google's personalized home and made it more complicated and less functional. Prettier weather icons, though! - themulf, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3live.com reminds me of altavista and msn customizable homepage. For some reason I never cared enough to use them. Am I alone here, or have customizable homepages just not been appealing?
- garraeth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I didn't think the MS one was too slow...
But I was bummed because I like to have 100 results on a page and do a [ctrl]-f to do an on-page search sometimes. Can't do that w/ the MS AJAX deal. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1" there is a 'hide' setting at the upper right on live.com if you prefer just a basic search bar. It loads much faster that way, too."
Where is this hide setting that you speak of...I think its hiding..whoops nevermind I found it...kind of pointless isnt it to have a search engine with a customizable homepage that alot of people dont really need or want and have to go thrrough the trouble of hiding everything when all they want to do is use the search engine. As for everything else the design is sleek to an extent, that is until you realize how much crap is on the homepage. The search brings up relevant items but I havent tried to look for anyhting obscure or complex yet so I cant fully judge that but from what everyone has been saying so far it dosent beat googles index. and over all it just seem to forced in alot of ways, in the sense that they focused on how they could topple Google instead of what works for the consumer. Still pretty cool though. - garg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Exactly, I can't believe they put a stupid fade in effect for the actual search form!
The infinite scroll bar adds nothing of value either. Plus imagine having a phone conversation with a client who can't find something on Live.com
Client: Where was the search result we saw this morning?
Me: umm.. just scroll down to half of infinity and you'll see it ... maybe..
In google:
Me: Go to middle of page 3 - ojk007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1THAT GREEN BAR
Probably isnt a result count. As they use the same icon for PageRank i would strongley suggest that its the relevance. - omnivector, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Google currently owns about 68% of internet searches, and Yahoo!'s #2 (not sure the exact percentage) but it is high up there.
- Branden, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It works fine for Firefox. Loads nice and fast for me too. You sure you are not having some other problems or something?
- gigabitten, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3yeah, but google still comes up faster while windows live has loading screens. plus, live has a neverending scroll of results with no back to top button.
- BugMeNot2, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2If only we had faster Internet connections (like Korea and Japan...)
- diggnationdevon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I think the Live interface looks nicer.
- rossbrown, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Wow, the live.com search works well for me. I like the interface of it a lot. I'm thinking it may almost try to be too inclusive, though. Everything on one page is not always good. It seems like their main problem now is performance consistency on different systems, as we can see is a problem by reading the comments.
- DamianG123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"kind of pointless isn't it to have a search engine with a customizable homepage that a lot of people don't really need or want "
I apologize. I didn't realize we had a digg member who already knew what most people wanted.
I use Google and I actually prefer it with the customized feeds, weather, etc. It's a nice compilation of most of the things I read on just one site. I also prefer Live.com that way. The fact is that neither you or I know what "people don't really need or want." However, there are definitely some people who like the customized page. In fact, I would argue the opposite of your assumption and say that a lot do.
Having said all of that, once Vista and IE7 arrive and multitudes begin to adopt them, the RSS engine among other features will make the customized Live.com and Google seem superfluous. However, if you're ever using a friend's computer, a computer at work, school, etc, then you don't have that available. So just log into Live.com or Google and like magic, there are your feeds, etc.
Anyways, if you don't like it, then hide it. It's as simple as that. But since it's shown by default with Live.com, perhaps people will try it out and like it. That's why it isn't hidden by default. - DamianG123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Google has the same feature, called Personalized Google. Incase you didn't notice, there is a 'hide' setting at the upper right on live.com if you prefer just a basic search bar. It loads much faster that way, too.
Anyways, I agree that Google still wins in the performance and search results. However, I'm not sure what kind of "lag" everyone else is experiencing, but for me, Live.com is actually very quick--especially compared to how slow it was a couple months ago. The infinite search results are great. The scroll bar just needs to be tweaked.
I'm not going to switch from Google, but if Live.com ever develops a better or on par search algorithm, see ya google. - SaratogaCx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Doesn't microsoft use an icon close to that in Excel for softing columns?
- DevlinD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Man I tried live.com when it first came out and I actually liked it better then than I do now. For some reason I believe that the scrollbar used to be different, I thought it just used to sit in the middle of the bar and you could click arrows on to navigate to different 'pages' of the search (the mouse wheel worked ok in that scenario).
Now it appears that the scrollbar actually moves but when you take it directly to the bottom it jumps back up...guess thats what happens when you scroll to bloody INFINITY...and it doubly helps when the scrollbar lags while doing it...nice.
Page took a little long to load but with all that crap on there how could it not. I know I COULD use the alternate search.live.com but that is just too much to type for me. But the one thing that hasnt changed was the speed at which my results were found. I dont know about the rest of you but I think live.com is pretty damn fast, my results were almost instantly displayed...cant really improve on that.
And with all this talk of AJAX and its use in various applications it seems as though all these search engines with the exception of Google seem to be missing the value of having an asynchronous mechanism for making server calls to improve the user experience. And what has google done with AJAX that completely seperates itself from its competitors???
GOOGLE SUGGEST!!!!!
This is the only search engine I use because quite frankly its the only one that actually employs AJAX to make searching easier (forget about speed and interface Im talking about help me find what I am looking for regardless if it takes 1 second or 1 minute....ok 1 minute would be a little slow but you get the point), everything else is just the same old same old and Im sorry but a neverending scrolling page where the back button doesnt work and some flashy...well...flash just doesnt cut it in my books. I hardly think of that as innovation on any level.
Despite all this I think that the new live.com is a decent search engine and if they play their cards right and manage to actually innovate and add some new value to search as we know it, they might actually have a shot a knocking off Google.
Some people still forget that Microsoft has pretty much made its living playing catch up with its competitors and it would appear that they havent done a bad job at it for the past 20 years. The real question is will their old business model still hold up on the new battle ground of Web 2.0 and if it wont...how fast will they be able to play catch up again? Its one thing playing catch up with technology but an entirely different sport when trying to play catch up with an obsolete business model, especially when you are as big as MS. - wilymon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Looks like Microsoft is taking a page out of the Apple playbook, very elegant design. while Google is going with the Excite.com playbook. Seriously, i love Google, but that page set up does nothing for them.
- casiotone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Why should he learn to use the added features when the end result is no better than what you get using the simple ones?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1No. I you think Yahoo has a small market share, then you must think that Apple and Linux combined don't even EXIST in hte OS market.
- nielsbjerg, on 07/06/2009, -1/+1So I actually like the new m$ look-feel of the live.com page, but does anyone other than me see the problem of "logo stealing" ? If you go to http://microsoftgadgets.com/Macros of the live.com page (Its under the "find macro" little arrow down symbol) it looks just a bit like something I saw before hint: http://kde.org/screenshots/images/3.1/fullsize/0.png
Other than that; Nice going m$ this is by far the best thing to come from you since I don't know when... - andrewlevy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I dont think Google is testing a new interface, just a new look to the site. Do you really think this is supposed to display some grand and flashy new features?
Microsoft on the other hand completely redesigned and added features to their old msn search (now Live).
So how can you compare these two? - Sudha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Has anyone tried http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ or http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/. Hope when they are live yahoo will be able to get more market share.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1WEll, it is beta. NO one is saying hte pages will never load faster.
- takeda, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Microsoft cannot even get the search engine right.
Why should I use it, if it only works on IE (does it work on FF)? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1sorry Mvvde but Flankk is right you are the only one left. sorry dude
"No. I you think Yahoo has a small market share, then you must think that Apple and Linux combined don't even EXIST in hte OS market."
Yahoo use to be second in search according to USA today but after lengthy battles to keep its prime position from MSN and ASk it decided to step into the shadows on the search front and since then its no telling if they still covet the #2 position. As far as im concerned Yahoo as a search engine is dead, dont get me wrong people still use it for their other needs, but thats as far as i would travel down their road - aaronm67, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4I wonder if Live.com is so slow because it is still in Beta.
Wouldn't it make sense to use fewer servers while testing the site, and gradually upgrade the hardware while it progresses through it's beta? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3MS site is way better than Google. But hey, Its "M$" so the MO here is to trash it for any reason you can pull out of your ass.
- cjbanna, on 10/12/2007, -13/+11Live.com's interface makes me want to gouge out my eyes with a spoon.
- Escamillo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Yeah, in Live, the "scrollbar" itself is clunky, but if you just use the mouse wheel or the PageUp/PageDown buttons, it works great. :-)
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