Making Search Better

Not sure how many of you have seen the recent changes in the search functions of Windows Live of late. It's seems inevitable for people to draw comparisons between the search capabilities of Windows Live, Google and that of Yahoo, but I must admit I was pretty impressed with the leaps that Windows Live search have delivered in the recent weeks.

First off, the searches themselves are becoming that much more relevant. When I was thinking about what to use as an example for this blog, I could not help but try a search term on the show my wife is watching in the background "Grey's Anatomy". Not really a big fan of it myself, but Janet LOVES it. Anyway... check out the results we get back from Windows Live now, its very cool.

So one of the things you will notice at the top is the results that say "Top videos of "grey s" anatomy. These things here aren't just screen shots, but if you hover over them you will notice that the videos actually play small highlights from the entire video, so you actually get a preview of the video before clicking on it to get to the whole thing, helping you to ensure that it is the correct video you are looking for. Very cool. So then when you actually click on the link to see all the videos, you get presented with the whole collection of videos, videos from AOL, YouTube, ABC, all over the place, and once again in this view, you can also hover over the screenshot and get a preview play.

One of the other things that the Live team are working on, is "verticalizing" search functionality. To see this in action, you should check out https://health.live.com. This is great example of really specializing in the search space.

So HealthVault allows you to search on a particular condition, as you could on any search site, but this uses content sources specific to the health space. So I decided to do a search on Asthma, certainly a very common condition for a lot of people.

As you can see, there is a lot of rich information presented to the user around the topic of "Asthma".

So if we have a look at some of the features of the results presented, you will notice the sections regarding "Personal Health", "Conditions" etc., these are refinement areas that enable you to narrow down particular cases you may be referring to.

You will also notice the "Article Results" sections, this is an area which pulls from popular journals and websites articles about the condition of asthma. Now what is cool about this is that by clicking on the different screen shots of pages in the section, the article underneath is automatically refreshed, no need to reload or navigate to another page.

You will also notice in the top right corner the "Your Scrapbook" function, which enables you to collect information that you find in to your own personal scrapbook, this function however is currently only available to people in the US.

Anyway, looks like another episode of Grey's Anatomy is over, and I am going to try my luck at getting a shot on the TV with Halo 3. Catch you all soon,

Matty H