No surprise. We knew Live Search was about to go live (no pun) with recent updates and even blog posts announcing a bunch of new changes.

This AP story has more.

Among other changes, Live Search will include improved ways to refine a search engine query so a user can better differentiate whether they are searching, for, say, the jaguar animal, car or Apple Computer Inc. operating system, said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Live Search effort.

In fact, the image search refinements were mentioned in a blog post about two weeks ago.

This update has improved relevance, an expanded index of images, faster AJAX code for the user experience, and a scratchpad for working on a collection of images. Also – check out the new “related names” feature by searching on anybody you consider famous – like Barry Bonds, George Bush, Bill Clinton or Oprah Winfrey.

More from MSN in this blog post.

Image search results pages also includes a slider to let the user determine the layout of the page and a pulldown to limit to specific sizes of images. Each image also includes a link to a “scratchpad” where you can store images. The AJAX drag and drop to the scratchpad is nice.

Searching for images of people, for example (Warren Buffet) includes a list of related names. Btw, Ask.com has been using Zoom technology with their image database since the beginning of the year. You’ll not only find related names of people but also ideas to narrow or expand your search. Warren Buffet example at Ask.com. Zoom is also available with web search at Ask while Live Search only offers related searches.

One image feature we were surprised not to see (at least for now) is image results based on web search query. For example, image of xxx or pics of xxx. This is something that Ask, Google, and Yahoo offer.

Btw, Academic Search is not listed on the home page. You’re given four options (web, images, news, local) and on a results page two more search options appear:
+ QnA
+ More (it’s here you’ll find links to academic, video, feeds, product (all betas), and macros.
+ The advanced search link as well as preferences/options has been moved off of the home page and is found below the search box. The results ranking sliders are still available.
+ Cached pages (nice) continue with a date stamp on the cached version.
+ Love the live sports scores for games in progress.

You can also now go directly to Live Search using the URL: Search.live.com. If you’re logged in as a Live.com user, you can go to your personalized home page by using my.live.com.

Also, out of beta on Tuesday, Live Local in the U.S. and U.K. is the wonderful service with the bird’s eye imagery (here’s Union Station in D.C.) for many major metro areas. However, no word on if more bird’s eye imagery has been made available. White pages data (people search) has also been added.

UPDATE: More bird’s eye imagery has been added according to the VE Blog.

We’ve added dozens of new cities with birds eye coverage in this release. San Diego, Portland, Milwaukee, … here is a growing Collection of them with the newest additions at the end. Lots of smaller cities have been added and many cities where we had coverage in the past have been greatly expanded. Check out Washington DC for instance, where coverage extends deep into the burbs. Also, in many cases it is really the entire county that is covered and not just the cities listed, so just use the pushpins as a starting point for exploration

Note: Bird’s Eye imagery is still not available for Chicago.

+ Also new from Live Local. Click to call. Released in beta in July. New is the option to send info to your mobile via SMS.
+ Draw on your maps. Cool!

See Also: MSN Video Search Beta Launched (8/25/2006)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.