Sam Davyson

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.