MSN has announced that their MSN search would be powered by “live” search everywhere by Thursday. So far this announcement has made more of a thump than elicited the excitement they were expecting. Mainly because the differences between MSN search and Live search are… well… um… well they look different!

But perform the same. From my tests I see the same results.

MS is excited about this because they are officially taking Live off of beta and Live Local is also off beta. I guess the real benefit is that QNA (just released in beta), a service where you can ask live humans answers to your questions has been added.
The problem Microsoft is facing is multi-facetted. From a marketing perspective what is Windows Live? Their description is a bit vague. And really looks like more copy-cat tactics the other search engines have been using for a while.

Ooooh, now I can click “images” and see pictures instead of sites for my query?

I’m not impressed. And it’s something they already offered as part of the old MSN search.
Maybe there is more information on the about page but I can’t see any text in FireFox. If the name of the page is “Get Live” and the point is to convert people over shouldn’t it work in competing browsers?

Of course there is an issue with the word “live”. How do you pronounce it? Is it “lahyv” as in alive or is it “liv” like he lived a long time ago? I assume the former as it sounds more dynamic to me.

The “related searches” is nice though. Even Ask thinks so.

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