Found this link about Live Search on the Microsoft home page.

Vista has finally arrived!

See here and here

I was playing with the MSN Search web service to try and enable Live Search into websites a couple of days ago and I lost the article reference that I was reading through with the examples.

Today while searching for that article I stumbled across this link. Apparently there are easy ways of integrating Live Search into your websites without having them embedded.

The link above allows you to implement the search in two ways, one by having the search box only and redirecting the results to the Live Search results. The second is by having a floating window that displays the results on top of your web site.

Check it out.

I'm currently also playing with the MSN Search web service (why is it called MSN and not Live when it's for Live Search?)  and will be posting more about this soon.

It's about time I started blogging again, it's been a while. A couple of days ago I realized that Google has made a new offering with it's search services. Google Personalized Search. And almost instantly I was thinking, this looks familiar and you know why. I blogged about something very similar before a while back when I posted about Windows Live Search Macros.

It looks like Google are offering a very similar service to WLSM. I have not tried Google's yet but will be checking it out soon.

I guess Google likes some of Microsoft's ideas! They even have an ugly looking service similar to Windows Live, have you ever seen the link that says personalized page on Google?

This just keeps getting better and better all the time! I've now found yet another reason to use Live Search. The Image Search features are really great. Viewing full size images was a very nice idea but here are some even better ones IMO. The scratch pad and the related people panes, VERY NICE. The scratch pad allows you to drag images to the side of the page and build a collection of images from the search results you get and the Related people pane also shows when you search for a person in images, if you seach for bill gates for example, you see Paul Allen, Warren Buffet ...etc in the related people list.

Here's a screenshot showing the scratch pad.

So Windows Live Search is now Live, and also has new features. I just noticed that there is now an "Only from New Zealand" checkbox that lets you localize the search. It's good this has now been made avaialbe and surely enough I had to try it out.

So I decided to seach for myself and it looks like Windows Live Search knows best!

Searching for "Dan" using WLS with only NZ selected returns my blog as the no1 result (yay!) and if I search for "Daniel" on WLS search I also end up on the first page but I show on 5th. Not bad!

On Google searching for "Dan" finds my blog on the top of page three when NZ is selected.

Will try to play with the algorithm customization thing I blogged about earlier and see what that does to the results (not that I want to!) it's good to be on page one.

The only annoying thing that I see after the release is renaming Windows Live TM Search to Live Search. I think it was better when all Windows Live pages had the Windows word in them rather than some having it and some not.

Just read this on Computer World. I have been wondering about this a few years ago thinking that it would be nice if it does happen.

I guess we will be seeing more softies in Christchurch on regular basis now. Nice... 

As you can probably tell by now, I've been paying a lot of attention to Windows Live generally lately as well as Windows Live Search specifically. This has actually got me thinking about Google again and back again to my Innovation and Creativity post.

As you would have read in that post, I mentioned that I don't like it when companies go out of what they do best to invest in offerings done by other companies and that I think there should always be new ideas ...etc but acknowledged that new entrants help evolve existing products but here's the question. Do they?

Now as you know I've been having a close look at Windows Live Search recently and I like it a lot, it even looks like it might be out of beta soon. The logo doesn't have the word beta any more, there's no news of that anywhere though.

So I went back to take a close look at Google Search, now we all know that this is their big thing, after all they are the best search engine in the world. Well they might be, but is it going to stay so? I wouldn't be so sure about that, and here's why. Unless there's a secret Google search revamp project going somewhere. I thing Google has a problem, they are investing in areas which IMO are out of their main services - email,spreadsheets,IM's ..etc and are forgetting their core service?

I personally am starting to slowly go away from Google. Windows Live Search is great for me and I use a lot of the other Windows Live offerings anyway, so it's easier for me that way. So unless Google are doing something to renew their search engine, they could lose me!