The first thing I noticed when visting Live.com was the simplicity of the user interface on the home page. There are no advertisements, and very little text, leading the user to focus directly on the search field. The simplicity of it reminds me of the Google interface, which I have always appreciated. However, if you want to enhance the home page, the Windows Live home page does allow for personalization of its content. News, sports, weather forecasts, entertainment, and stock quotes are some examples of information that can be added to your personalized Windows Live home page.

The second thing to note in the Live Search interface are the links directly below the search field that make up the "scope bar". These links allow you to search Windows Live for images and news stories, as well as for local maps and driving directions. The map feature, powered by Microsoft's Virtual Earth is impressive. Similar to Google Maps, it allows the user to navigate by clicking and dragging the map, and the zoom feature is activated easily with the mouse wheel. Satellite imagery of the area is also available when the aerial view is selected.

Not to be outdone by Yahoo! or Google, Microsoft has also launched a new question and answer service called QnA. This service is free, and appears quite similar to Yahoo! Answers. In contrast, the Google Answers service charges a minimum of $2.50 for answers to your questions. It's interesting to see the major search engines embrace these types of question and answer services. Personally, I've found that the search engine results themselves are sufficient to answer most questions I have. However, since visiting web sites to find the answers to your questions does require an investment of time, the question and answer services might be a good resource for those who either do not have time to spend researching a particular question, or perhaps have already attempted to research a question without success.

A few other features worth mentioning are still in development, including the video, academic, feeds, and products searches. The video search feature is reminiscent Google Video or Yahoo! Video, and allows you to locate videos online as you might expect. The academic search feature is interesting, and is a good way to locate abstracts of academic papers (the complete texts of these papers are not available online, however). The Feeds engine helps you to locate RSS feeds available online for any topic, and the Product search will find products available for sale online.

Conclusion
Microsoft's Windows Live search engine offers a broad set of search features and is an excellent alternative to other major search engines. Whether the launch of this new engine will increase Microsoft's search share or not remains to be seen. (In 2005, MSN had only 11.4% of all searches compared to Yahoo! with 23.5% and Google with 46.3%). Windows Live's impressive performance and many new features will make this new engine a strong competitor and may help to narrow Google's substantial lead in search.

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