Live Search

Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search) is the name of Microsoft’s web search engine, successor to MSN Search, designed to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo! Live Search is accessible through Microsoft’s Live.com and MSN web portal.

MSN Search first launched in Autumn 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own Microsoft-built search engine results, the index of which is updated weekly or even daily.

MSN Search comprised a search engine, index, and web crawler and became Live Search in September 2006. It offers users the ability to search for specific types of information using search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta. Life Search aims to make its over 2.5 billion worldwide queries each month “more useful by providing consumers with improved access to information and more precise answers to their questions.” A configuration menu is available to change the default search engine in Internet Explorer, but the selection is sometimes criticised as being limited, and a custom URL cannot be entered without installing an add-on. In the roll-over from MSN Search to Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, fuelled by their own internal image search algorithms.

The new search engine offers some innovative features, such as the ability to view additional search results on the same web page (instead of needing to click through to subsequent search result pages) and the ability to dynamically adjust the amount of information displayed for each search-result (i.e. just the title, a short summary, or a longer summary). It also allows the user to save searches and see them updated automatically on Live.com.