First and foremost, I would like to point out that i've never used Windows Live Search, or what used to be MSN Search. Why? Because my experience of inconsistency in design, layout, and the general results that are found from the searches are not as I would like from a search engine. The image search does utilise (or used to) AJAX to display image results in a sidebar layout, which although I didn't really feel necessary in a search, was really cool. I'm not denying the fact that not all of the service is bad, but in this post i'm going to highlight most of the bad.
So, what sparked me off to write the post? Well, coming back to my inconsistency of design and layout of the website is a major factor in my online searching habits. The design of Google has been the best design for a search engine; plain, simple and static. Just take a look at the Google homepage; even 6 years ago the design was simple and easy to use, and if anything has gotten simpler since.
The old design for live search, the one that was in place about a week ago was okay. It filled most of the page, was simple, and looked quite attractive. The new design however, launched either yesterday or the day before in my opinion isn't as good as the last. This again returns me to my point about inconsistency of design, because I really wouldn't recognise the new page at a glance, if I hadn't looked at the address bar. Ask.com is red, and white, Google blue and white, Yahoo! red and light blue, Live Search is what? Light green? Oh wait, they're getting rid of that. It seems that the only theme that they are sticking with is the white pearl in the corner of the page.
So, the results. That's the most important part a search engine, right? So, i've put together a dissection of the results page showing stuff that I think is good, and stuff that I think is bad about the new design.
I think they still have a little way to go with the service, but excluding the homepage this seems to be a milestone update, and a great improvement.
