I posted an analysis of Live.com’s search interface not so long ago. And today on the official “beta-tag-removal” day I see many of the criticisms I made corrected in ways I suggested.
Lets first compare the looks. Here is the old:

And the new:

There are a few striking differences I think you will agree. Lets review what I criticised.

1. Live.com is styled not to underline the links. This is not really a problem for identifying the links, they are still pretty clear since they are marked in blue. But I think it may add some extra whitespace between the title of the webpage in the results and the description associated with the page.

>> Now the links are underlined just as they are on Google. The extra whitespace still seems to be there though.

2. The clarity of the tabbing system they have used at the top there could also be improved. At the moment it is not only not clear what they are, but also that you are on one of them (Web).

>> It is now much clearer that you are on Web which has a lighter shade for its background.

3. They have a footer at the bottom of the page that is visible since the search uses the infinite scroll bar so you feel like you are looking at a results viewer rather than just viewing the results.

>> They have dropped the infinite scroll bar! At least for the Web tab by default they have. It seems to be enabled for the image search. So with this of course the footer can be lost from “above the fold”.

One bug they seem to have picked up rather than corrected is they now have a space before the name of the file the page is from. E.g. “www.google.com/support/talk/bin/ answer.py?answer=24075″. I am not sure what the point of that is, but it certainly doesn’t make anything clearer for me.
I finished by concluding that the whole thing had a pretty gormless look, which with the changes they have made seems to have gone. I am liking this search facility now, competition is of course always good for the consumer.

We are all used to Googling. Very used to it. It is good for the consumer though that companies are still innovating in the search space to keep Google on its toes. Live.com’s search is a great example of this. Whilst I wouldn’t use it right now it is certainly showing that Microsoft are thinking about how to change search for the better. One thing though that I think is dealying people’s transition is that the search results they get from Live just don’t quite look right. Lets see what I mean.

Here is a Google search for a search term chosen at random:

And here is what Live.com shows for the same term:

They look pretty different I am sure you will agree. In both cases I have cut off a huge amount of whitespace from the right of the image. Both engines take a set width approach leaving room for advertisements and keeping their design suitable for all screen shapes and sizes. No advertisements were shown on either search results page though, so the loss of this space is no great loss for the analysis.

The thing that hits me straight away is the underlining. Live.com is styled not to underline the links. This is not really a problem for identifying the links, they are still pretty clear since they are marked in blue. But I think it may add some extra whitespace between the title of the webpage in the results and the description associated with the page. The next difference you notice really has to be the header. Microsoft have got themselves a very sexy header that I have to admit looks pretty nice. The colours work well for me and I only wish the colour didn’t fade so quickly to the white background seen in the results area. The clarity of the tabbing system they have used at the top there could also be improved. At the moment it is not only not clear what they are, but also that you are on one of them (Web).

I am not sure what the deal with the blue border is. They have a footer at the bottom of the page that is visible since the search uses the infinite scroll bar so you feel like you are looking at a results viewer rather than just viewing the results. In case you are not familiar with this tool the box on the page where the results appear feels like a inline frame which you can scroll independently of the rest of the page. Except really it is not a frame it is some AJAX masterpiece I suppose which loads more results as you scroll down it so you never have to hit a “next page” button again. The begging question of course is why can’t they work instead on the search quality so you would never need to click next page anyway. But that is somewhat a different issue… The footer I feel wastes vertical space, and gives precisely nothing to the search experience. I would also prefer half of the next result to be shown at the bottom of the window to remind me that I can scroll for more. Right now I think you could be forgiven for thinking that the search had only returned 6 results.

I think that the choice of font is strange. I can’t actually work out what it is but I think it really degrades the whole appearance of the page and adds significantly to the gormless look it takes on. Another factor in this is the way the bold search term highlighting is used. Yes Google does the same thing but I think that the font chosen has a much bigger difference between its bold and non-bold text than the one Google uses. This means that glancing down the page all you really see is the bold search term repeated again and again. You inputted the term after all, so just seeing it coming straight back at you is not the most useful of services. The colour of the font is also pretty unbelievable. It really could do with a solid black text colour to assert itself, but the pale shade of gray compounds this gormless feel.

And somewhere they are wasting a lot of space. I can’t quite work out where it is all going but if you compare the two listings you will see that they have both served six results. But Live.com’s have noticeably worse descriptions, and a smaller font size, which really doesn’t add up. I suspect that much is lost in the header, and footer and also perhaps a slightly bigger gap in between search results. I think someone just needs to take the stylesheet for the page and make a few sensible adjustments. If you want people to treat the search engine seriously then please make it look serious. Grey text on a white background is just far to wishy washy.

I love YubNub. I use it as my default “search” plugin in every browser that I have. I use it instead of having keywords setup for bookmarks. Not only does it mean that when I switch browsers or computers the experience is the same but also many shortcuts are already created and you can use them with ease to increase efficiency of searching and surfing.

What is YubNub? Know the answer? Skip on.

YubNub is the social command line of the web. It is a database of commands created by users by which you can go to websites, search websites and a whole load of other things. By learning a few commands you can soon do things quicker on the web.

Commands I use

I used to have a large collection of bookmarks in my browser with keyword shortcuts for alot of them. I now have transfered them all to YubNub (and some of them were already there). Now if I change computers I can keep using the same shortcuts without setting them up again. Many of them also work as searches you just need to append your search terms at the end of the command.

And the staple commands that you need for YubNub: create - makes new commands, ls - to search the current commands, and man - information about a command. Above is not by any means an exhaustive list. It is just the commands that suit me, there are plenty to chose from already and with the create command if they don’t have what you need you just make it. Interestingly I have just found QuickSilver, which is sort of like a command line for everything on the computer. I am not sure exactly how it works yet. But it looks good.

As was first seen on the Google Blogoscoped Blog, Google teamed up with the Da Vinci code film release to produce a set of puzzles relating to the film. The prizes were varied on the basis of where you lived, but I never checked what they were. I just wanted to play the puzzles. Google played a good trick with this thing though, they made the puzzle a Google Module for their personalised homepage which will have brought in new users to that service I am sure. I thought the puzzle would appear actually on your homepage but instead the homepage keeps track of your progress as you move through the challenges. And as I moved through the challenge I realised that it wasn’t just the personalised homepage being advertised here. Google interweaved a lot of their services into this challenge.

Day One
The link launched a flash window in which the puzzle was explained and played. The basic idea was a 2 x 2 x 2 sudoku with 4 symbols instead of numbers. In some puzzles the “boxes” weren’t boxes either they were all sorts of different shapes. But it was always pretty easy to complete. Here is one example: Question/Solution. Upon completion a question was asked about the symbol on the character that appeared on the left like this. The answer was “blade”. This answer was soon on all the forums but it was also on Wikipedia beforehand and on About.com here. This challenge gave a point in the symbol row.

Day Two
This puzzle was pretty dissapointing. On a honeycomb style grid you had to combine hexagons that were one space apart exavctly. The thing was if you did it in just the right order you could clear them all (or leave one), and that was the aim in the puzzle. The context was about revealing a message. The question which followed was another “name this symbol” type question and About.com had the answer again, “Greek Cross”. You got a point in the restoration row.

Day Three
This was a really different challenge. And here Google went for something clever again. They asked you to find a video on Google Video which was atrailer for the film. You then had to watch the video carefully inorder to answer three questions. The first was the name of another symbol that appeared in the clip which was “Fleur de lis”, then about a painting that also featured “vitruvian man”, and finally a maths question. This final one is possible with no maths knowledge via a Google search or possible with no Google search via Maths knowledge. It was about an encrypter with so many parts with 26 letters on each. The total number of letter combinations was 11,881,376. How many parts wre there? 26^5 = 11881376, so the answer is 5. This challenge gave you a point in the observation row.

Day Four
This was a curators challenge. You had a series of hooks which you were to suspend pictures from. The pictures were such that some required two hooks etc, so it wasn’t as easy as it may sound — but it was still very easy. At the end of putting all of the pictures on the wall you had to identify another symbol on someone’s face, this time it was “Chalice”, which could be found at a variety of resources online, as other symbols above could be.

Day Five
Very good puzzle today. Chess game style. You move your opponents pieces too so that makes it easier. But you get one move, they get one, and then you get one and…. in the space of those three moves you have to get them in check mate. But it is easier than that: There are only a few (four) possible moves allowed at each step. But you can also solve it if you are crap at chess! Each of the four allowed moves corresponds to an answer to a multiple choice (Da Vinci) question that appears on the left. So you can answer three questions correctly (and you will automatically checkmate the king) or you can use your chess skills. Also in the description it says you may want to use Google Web Search to help you with the questions. Another Google service that they are advertising through this competition. Nice. The correct answers were 1/ Cilice 2/ Senechaux 3/ Keystone.

Day Six
This puzzle was a jigsaw, and the picture was of an image from Google Earth/Maps. So that is a neat bit of link up with the maps service to start with. Also at the top it said “Lost your bearings? Try Google Maps”. Once you had assembled the puzzle you had to answer a question about the place namely “Where is this?”. But they linked it with Da Vinci by giving an extra clue saying that some sculpture of one of Da Vinci’s works (The Last Supper) is in this city. The answer was New York. This got a point on the Geography row.

So lets just do a quick tally, we are six days in so a quarter of the way through. Google has brought in Google Video, Google Web Search, and Google Earth/Maps, as well as having the whole thing on their Personalised Homepage. So if they keep bringing in services at this rate we can expect roughly one every other puzzle. I really think that Google will be doing well out of this deal. As for the film, well, who knows! I have never read the book. But having sat through the trailer, information about the characters, and pages of symbols I might be interested in going to see what it is all about.

Interestingly Google is pushing this quiz hard, they are advertising it on the Personalised Homepage like this. I wonder how many people there are playing now. If you missed it starting then you aren’t too late, just sign up on the Homepage and you will have all the challenges still to do. If you do get involved then you can follow all the progress, and discuss the puzzles in the Google Blogoscoped forum.

This is a new blog that calls for the saving of the Ask Jeeves character. Apparently Interactive Corp. (the new owners of Ask Jeeves) what to dump the butler figure.

The blog was created and is written by an ex-Jeeves worker who feels that dropping the Butler would be the worst move the company could take. In the extremely long posts he says “the butler commands loyalty” and claims that Ask.com has a user base that is quite seperate from the big name engines of Google and the like.

I find this all rather amusing after yesterday I got a visitor to my site (infact to this very blog) who had searched for “the worlds best mathematician” on Ask Jeeves. The second result was this post which does not provide the answer to the question at all. I think Ask Jeeves need to concentrate on their results and not their icon.

Search Engine Watch (my post) offers suggestions to changes to other engines logos.

I said I would do a post about Search Engine Watch so now I will. Search Engine Watch is a very sensibly titled website. It watches Search Engines.

But that doesn’t mean that all of the staff spend day after day staring into the Google Homepage to make sure that nothing untoward happens, instead they provide excellent commentary and comment on all of thge latest search related news. They also often have the news before it is news giving you a preview of what is to come.

The site has news, a blog, forums and loads of other bits and bobs. It is seriously recommended if you want to know anything ever about search.

You can submit comments to the team and sometimes editor Danny Sulivan will even mention you in an article. Which is nice.

Google launch a Blog Search they announce on their blog, and Blogger report on theirs. This has been drawn together with an update to Blogger.com (as Adam points out) which brings a scroller of the most recently updated blogs and “Blogs of Note”.

When users sign in they also get a bright blue box to greet them on the Dashboard. This is rather against the general Blogger theme of subtle fading browns, and I have to say I think it looks terribly ugly. A “Search All Blogs” link has also been added to the bar that goes at the top of Blogger Blogs. This joins the “Search this Blog” which used to use a Google Site Search to find posts on your blog. I think it was largely useless, as most peoples’ blogs weren’t indexed on Google. However this link has now changed to a Google Blog Site Search using the parameter blogurl:yourblog.com within your search terms. Obviously this is omitted for the “Search All Blogs” option. [As a side note this bar across the top of your Blogger blog is removable contrary to what many Blogger users may believe. Simply select "None" on the template page*. The downside: you don't get people clicking "Next Blog >>" ending up at our place.]

I notice however that the integration of this new service hasn’t been perfect. For instance, normally searching on Google for a news item alerts you to recents goings on on Google News, or to relevant books on Google Print. But searching for Blogs about Skiing doesn’t say: “Why not try our juicy new Blog Search?”. It would clearly better if it did.

Search Engine Watch (I’ll review that site itself some day) reports about the launch of the Blog Search including how to make sure your blog is included.

I also notice that Gmail has earned a place on the bottom of the Google Services page. I imagine this was added when it went live a few weeks ago.

//Update: This blog is not very well indexed by the new search engine. Blogger only has the records from the days it was hosted on BlogSpot so most of the posts on the blog are not findable by the search. But, however, Google say it searched for all blogs, whether they are hosted by Google on not. So maybe see increased coverage soon.

*Terms and Conditions Apply. See comments.

Google are the kings of search. I know that.Well at least I thought I did. Recently whilst Google spreads its focus to other areas other search engines have started to really challenge Google on search results I think. Yahoo! for example recently announced its index (the pages that you search when you search Yahoo!) is larger than Google’s by a factor of almost 3. Admittedly it is not all about the index. Infact when almost everything you put into a search engine yields millions of pages of results you could say the index is rather unimportant, as everyone has already got too many pages to look at available. Another indicator of a good search engine is the rate of index update. As I recently saw in an article surrounding the launch of Google Talk, Yahoo! had the official Google Talk pages in their index way before Google did.

Anyway, Yahoo! is a big contender and it already offers all the services that Google is now starting to branch into (albeit of lower quality to the ones Google produces). But this post is about MSN Search, a relatively new search engine which I think is actually pretty good. I don’t know how big it’s index is, but it seems big enough, and the rate at which the index refreshes is unbelievable. It seems to update daily. Which I think is a fair bit more often than Google.

The main thing for me with MSN Search is that it lists my pages. A search for me, gives result number 1 as my homepage, and subsequent results are other pages that are mine. A search for me on Google gives a lot of trashy pages mixed in with some of my pages. To see how many of my pages are on the Google index one can search for site:153rd.com/sam (now site:sam.davyson.com). You get 5 results (see Update 3 below). On MSN Search you get 147. However that doesn’t mean that Google is necessarily worse. It might mean that MSN has picked up loads of trashy pages and has indexed those along with the rest. This is perhaps true, but the first results are useful, and as you scroll through the results you realise the PDF’s that I have on my site have also been cached. So have the DOC’s and the PUB files. Some are unsuccessful and the description is useless (see image below) but others are as good as the record of a HTML webpage. But even when it is unsuccessful at least the link is there.

So far I have ignored one of the most important features of a search engine. Infact probably the most important: accuracy. Does MSN give you relevant results? This is harder to gauge. And although it is certainly true when searching for myself the better results come from MSN Search how about a more mainstream search. Does the engine pick the best records from the index to show? I don’t know the answer to this question but I would imagine that both engines are similarly good at this. I think MSN Search has an advantage when a user is searching for a quick fact due to the linkage the MSN team have made with Encarta Answers. This gives instant answers to questions like “bear habitat” as seen in the image below. Google have come up with something similar since MSN Search launched called Q&A, but I find it’s recognition of questions that have straight answers is poor and it doesn’t have the reliable fact base of Encarta to use.

Overall I am a Google user. They beat MSN hands down in almost everything they move into. Email, Maps, Satellite Imaging, Blogs, Personal (Portal) Homepages… I also use Google for my searches. It is good. But to make use of the index that MSN has of my website I’ll be integrating an MSN Site Search to my pages within the coming weeks. This will provide an effective way of searching my content as unlike the Google Site Search I could employ it will stock more than 5 pages and will be updated regularly. So I think that MSN Search is better but I am still using Google Search? No. I don’t think that MSN Search is better. But I think it is a strong product and I don’t think that Google should take their crown for granted. And I hope they don’t, because search is so central to Google once the engine is rubbish their site traffic will disappear and so will their revenue and their ability to generate other superb products.

// Update: A search directory has been created (link) and several pages have got a search box added at the bottom (like this or this) when the user may not have found what they want.

// Update 2: A search box has been added to the side of blog pages. Expect further integration as the site continues to evolve.

// Update 3: A search on Google for site:153rd.com/sam (now site:sam.davyson.com) now gives 122 results. Most pages I have are covered. This is a huge change from the five when this post was originally released (4 days ago). It could be because of the Sitemap I submitted or more likely the huge index increase Google is showing as Search Engine Watch reports.

Relevant Images:
No longer online.