In an attempt to compete with industry leader Google, Microsoft has re-designed its Live Search service and claims to have better relevance, improved performance and more. Although the changes are clearly a response to Google's dominance, Microsoft is downplaying it somewhat, suggesting the main goal is improve the Live Search experience for existing users, rather than an attempt to win over Google fans.
Microsoft claims to have quadrupled the size of its index and improved its internal ranking algorithms, which the company says will improve your search results. It has also given the page some minor UI tweaks such as ditching the tab bar in favor of text links to the different search sections and changing the font for improved readability. In essence Live Search now much more closely mimics the look and feel of Google.
So how does it stack up against Google? I’ll confess I’ve never been a heavy user of Live Search so I’m not sure what it was like before, but the new version, while functional, failed to return the same quality of results I got from Google.
Of all the Live Search options, the traditional web search works best, but once you stray from there things go downhill quickly.
For instance, a search for Wired News on both sites returns the home page at the top of both results list and Live Search now mimics Google in providing sub-links to other sections of the site.
But move over to an image search for the same terms and the results become much less relevant; aside from some covers of the magazine, the results are in fact mostly irrelevant — an image of a Linksys router that happens to titled wired.jpg? Google on the other hand, manages to pull in a number of relevant images beyond the magazine covers.
By the time I got down to the map-based search Microsoft had lost the Wired thread completely and returned useless results — Google on the other hand, at least knows where our office is, though it too returns some pretty irrelevant information.
A few different search terms revealed similar results and even in those cases where Google stumbled, Live Search seemed to stumble just as much, if not more.
So no, Live Search isn’t much of a threat to Google, but for the 185 million people Microsoft claims use the service every month, the update and redesign will be welcome.
Note that the service is not quite live, you'll need to tweak the URLs somewhat or enable cookies to see the new version.
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