Ok so it’s been over two weeks since I’ve postedsaying that I will give Windows Live Search a try. Well here are some of my thoughts. In my previous post I mentioned two of the annoying things I found with Windows Live and posted an update on how to resolve one of them. Well it looks like the secondone (the position of the search box on thepage+ the tab order) has been solved! I was soo annoyed by this so I even ended uppostingfeedbackcomments to Windows Live about it! And guess what (they seemed to listen – yeah right!)
Well, not long after I posted the feedback Inoticed thatwhen you are not signed in to Windows Live, the page has been tidied up a bit with the search box in the middle of the page and the tab orderselecting thesearch box by default and all the other non necessary stuff not shown (NICE) this means that I can go and use Windows Live Searchjust as a search tool withouta distraction by all the other stuff just like I would use google. Ireally like thatchange.
Search Performance:
As for the search performance, well it seems to do a very decent job but there are 2 things that annoyed me. Search results for the stuff I looked for in the past two weeks were almost always relevant. I only went to Google once to find something I couldnt find directly by using WLS. However, there was one thing that spoilt my experiment (my Google addition!) on 3 or 4 occassions even when having WLS as my default page. When I am browsing somewhere else and needing to look for something I immediately find myself searching Google! Otherwise I was very please with Windows Live Search. The annoying thing I found was the way WLS displays the results- but there is a way around it. The way WLS displays results without letting you click to go to a next page is a very great idea but was annoying in the following case. If you use the cursor to move the scroll bar and reach the bottom if it, it automatically jumps back to the top of the middle of the page to continue displaying the results. This makes you lose the position of the cursor above the scroll bar which I found a bit annoying. The way around this is to just use the down arrow key on the keyboard (which of course is more efficient anyway)
So overall WLS is looking good. I’ve played with News,Images and the general search during those two weeks.