Microsoft announced the availability of new viewing capabilities within Image Search in the Windows Live Search beta on Friday. The new viewing capabilities have been designed to make searching as fast and as effective as possible with new features including;
- Search across millions of images
- Infinite scrolling
- Thumbnail-image-sizing customisation
- Filmstrip view
- The ability to see the final image without leaving the results page
- A richer image click-through experience
So what are they really like... are they any good or have the been let out of the bag too early... let's see shall we. Well I am on Firefox to start with... so lets see if the page loads ;) (www.live.com) Good start it loads the page. Now to do a search for me on images. The web search is fast... but the image search, well that takes me straight back to the live.com homepage! Now to try that again in IE.... Oh it loads in that! But no images of me in any of those images... And if I do the same search in google, I do actually get pictures of me associated with my name.
I like the infinate scrolling... and the filmstrip view as well as seeing the larger version of the image when you hover over it. However they need to get to work on those search algorithms and sort out the Firefox support. (since they do say that it is supported on their blog site. (http://spaces.msn.com/livecom/) Please test thoroughly!
posted @ Saturday, April 08, 2006 10:09 AM