Search Differently!!

The search engine market is hot, both the old giants Yahoo! and MSN have woken up from their slumber to thwart the search king Google and to get their share of the multi billion dollar pie. Yahoo! have already revamped their search, MSN did it as well, but perhaps it didn’t cut the cake for the latter, so Microsoft went to the drawing board again, and they’ve come up with a new solution. Like email, it seems that this new search solution will be the end of MSN probably, as they move the search as well to their services portal, Live.com.

So, the Live Search, as its being called, is sunk to its teeth in Javascript, a very much of a Web 2.0 application, what with AJAX powered search and a wierd looking interface.

When you enter your keywords and hit the search button, a sort of content window opens in the lower part of the page with a menubar on top and the search results in the left pane. If there are ads available for the searched keywords, then they are displayed in the right pane. So far all predictable, so what’s the difference some may ask. The difference lies here itself. Only 2 results are displayed by default. There’s a kind of scrollbar on the right side of the results pane, just where one would expect, its just that its not your regular scrollbar, but a Javascript powered one. You drag it to the bottom & the search results start scrolling, being queried from the server real-time using AJAX ofcourse. And if you want to view previous results, then they are available as well, just drag the scrollbar above and the results scroll back up. Well, you gotta feel and experience it to know what I’m talking about.

Its every bit cool that a Web 2.0 application is expected to be. But that’s just all. Right now it seriously lacks some accessibility and useability. For instance, it doesn’t work in any browser except Internet Explorer. It does seem to work in Opera but that’s just it, it doesn’t actually work!! And secondly, when I click the down arrow key of my keyboard, the search results should scroll down, which they don’t, however if I want to get the first result in a jiffy, all I need to press is the “Home” button of my keyboard & there I’m, at the first result of the search. Though the application like other Web 2.0 apps, is in beta, so we can only hope that these quirks etc. will be smoothed before its rolled out.

Meanwhile, you can try your search at http://search.live.com/ and enjoy its Javascript goodness!! Its a neat application, no denying the fact!!