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MSN Search Unveils New Features at Live.com
March 08, 2006
A post at Threadwatch yesterday noticed that MSN search results now stop at page 25. Additional results pages appear to exist, but when you click on results page 26, for example, nothing happens.
That curiousness was partly addressed later, as the Seattle Times pointed out that it's a feature, not a bug. The new MSN Search interface is in beta at Microsoft's live.com site.
The company is capping the maximum number of results at 250, or 1,000 for an image-based search, betting that no one really wants to sift through more than that. The move is risky in that it ratchets up the pressure for Microsoft to make sure those 250 results are the best and most relevant."We've made significant progress on the relevancy of our results and have to invest on improving that area," said Lisa Gurry, a product manager for the project. "The 250 number absolutely gives us the right level of depth."
The interface of the MSN Search beta is clean. One neat feature is a set of "slider" controls that enables you to efficiently skim results.
The small, horizontal slider controls the amount of information shown per result. At the minimal setting (far left), only a page title and URL are shown. The middle level shows those items plus a snippet of text from the page. The far right "maximum" setting shows an additional "Search within this site" feature, which, when clicked, opens up an additional search box enabling you to search within a site before even clicking over to that site. I like this capability, although I'm not sure how often the average user would use it.
The tall, vertical slider is also pretty cool. A click of the up or down arrow scrolls to the next pane of search results. You can also drag the slider up or down to move very rapidly through results. The big change here is that all search results are now shown on one page; you no longer need to click a new link to load the next 10 results. (Note to SEOs: Getting to the first "page" of MSN results just got a lot easier...)
As with all search engine interface changes, it's not necessarily how relevant the changes are, it's the combination of relevance, buzz, and adoption. MSN's Gurry is right when she says that average users probably don't need more than 250 results. The Times reporter is right that these 250 results need to be more relevant than ever.
By the way, I got the Live.com site to load correctly in IE, but not Firefox.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at March 8, 2006 07:06 AM
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