On the Soapbox

Microsoft has been making noise about defeating Google at its own game, and today, they unveiled a new search on their Windows Live service. It's not a new search engine. I compared the results with MSN search, and they're identical. It's simply MSN search wrapped in a sexier interface. I suppose they think that a new jazzed-up interface built using AJAX will help them unseat Google. Well, will it work?

• It does not work with Microsoft's IE 7b2. I thought that it'd be fair to get my first impression of this new toy using Microsoft's latest version of IE, but that didn't seem to be such a hot idea. Every search, whether it was done from the www.live.com or search.live.com kicked me back to the www.live.com home page.
• It does not work with Opera. But few people use Opera anyway.
• In Firefox, middle-clicking does not seem to work, so I can't open search links in new tabs unless I laboriously right-click to get a context menu and select from the menu. For someone who is now addicted to search result parallelism where I open up a bunch of search relevant search results in tabs so that they can load while I'm reading and so that I don't have to keep hitting the back button, this is a pain.
• Working with search results in the traditional form involves clicking on a result, and then hitting the back button to return to the results so that you can visit more results. This does not work in Firefox. Hitting back takes me back to the main page, where I have to do the search all over again. Wow, talk about totally wrecking the search interface!
• In IE6, hitting the back button is not as destructive. You do not have to do the search again, but there is a noticeable and annoying lag as the search results are re-loaded into the AJAX pane. What's worse is that you are taken back to the top of the search results. While this may not have been a problem with traditional search results where at least you'll be on the same page of results, when all the results are on one page and the only way to navigate through the results is by scrolling (somewhat slowly as the data is being loaded into the AJAX pane), this is a nightmare.
• Did I mention that scrolling was slow? Unless the user somehow thinks to use the page up and page down buttons, scrolling by the weird scrollbar widget (that took some use getting to) or by the mouse wheel is relatively slow (and not that much better even with the keyboard). In traditional paged views with traditional scrollbars, you can instantly jump to an absolute position; not true here.
• Have you see the Windows Live homepage on a resolution less than 1024x768 (or in a browser window at that resolution but that was not fully maximized), even in IE? Nothing like text running into each other to give off a nice professional first impression.

I think that the users on Slashdot summarized this well: this is a textbook example of how not to use AJAX to build a user interface. I wonder if this was what Microsoft had in mind when they talk about a Google killer.

Also, since this is not a new search engine, I wonder if Microsoft is doing this simply for the publicity. They launched the new MSN search with much fanfare, but it was poorly received. Perhaps they think that by re-launching the search in a new interface, they might get a fresh round of publicity? If so, I'm not sure if this blunder is the publicity that they want.