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.