As with most search portals, you can customize various bits of information. One example: you can set preferences like how many news items you wish to display on the page. This is fairly standard fare overall, but you can also set which sources you wish to use on the main page of Live.com as well as simply drag and drop the news section where you wish it to appear on the page. You can also add customized feeds from other pages, games, etc. to the page through what Microsoft has dubbed 'gadgets'. You can add Sudoku puzzles, a gas pricing monitor, Nasa's Picture of the Day, movie listings, and more. At www.microsoftgadgets.com you can even upload gadgets that you've designed yourself and share them with the Live.com community.

The actual search feature at Live.com certainly takes on a different feel compared to what most searchers are use to experiencing.

A few of the highlights:

Continuous results: It is common that a search results page displays about 10 results per HTML page plus any sponsored/ppc results on the top/bottom/sides of the normal search results before you have to click 'next' or a similar link to move to the next set of search results for your term. Live.com uses asynchronous javascript and XML (AJAX) scripting so that the search results page is constantly being updated as you move up or down through the list of search results. Thus if you continue to scroll down, the page will keep updating until you reach about the 240th search result or about the 26th page of search results.

Sponsored results: No longer included in the body of the page with the standard search results. A frame to the right of the main results remains stationary as you scroll through search results. Periodically this frame updates as you dig further into the standard search results.

More / less information in the results: You can set a preference for seeing more or less information about possible matches for your search term and thus see 4-8 results per viewable screen (more results per screen when you set it to display less information). An entry for MarketPosition.com could look like the following with the full descriptions setting or with a minimum display set:

MarketPosition
Warning About Duplicate Tags | MarketPosition Home | Yahoo Beta: Deep Search and Subscription based web sites. June 22, 2005 Yahoo Mindset: New Shopping and Research Tool.
www.marketposition.com/blog/archives/2005/06/yahoo_mindset_n.html
Search within this site

or

MarketPosition
www.marketposition.com/blog/archives/2005/06/yahoo_mindset_n.html

Saved Searches: So you've found a search that you might want to make again and again? No problem, you can add the saved keyword/phrase search to the main page of your Live.com account. In the main page this usually displays a smaller preview of the first few results for your search or allows you to run the full/normal search in a full window.

Special Search Macros: While you can place many gadgets on your main Live.com page, you can also add macros to your Live.com search. Thus if you were partial to reading articles from liberal or conservative web sites or wanted to search for podcasts, etc. you could add a macro to your search bar so that the search filters specific sets of criteria rather than just giving results from a keyword or phrase.

Overall the new search service is an inspired effort, but there are certainly features that will be missed if the current version is similar to the future, non-beta release. The ability to review a cached version of a page is missing. The ability to print out or review an entire page of results (in the traditional 10 results per page model) is not possible. Some users like myself will often search on a topic and open up results 12-20, 21-30, etc. in another tab of Firefox or Netscape (and possibly in Internet Explorer soon) but this is not really possible since the search results are a continuous feed. It remains to be seen if this site and its features are a harbinger of things to come from most of the top-competitive engines or if this will be a specialty/niche engine for the savvier searcher / computer user. If the target audience is indeed the general searcher, as many other products have experienced in the past, the ability to have so much control over so many features may be a bit overwhelming.

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