So, I’m probably the last guy to blog about the latest from our search engine, MSN Search. But better late than never. What’s always amazing to me is how important the UI is to search. One of the major changes we made was we finally fixed title highlighting. For some reason, in the previous UI; the title was displayed all in bold — which means you couldn’t see your highlights in the title, as keyword highlighting was also done in black. For example, consider the query for “Erik Selberg:”
Andy Edmonds and Erik Selberg - Frank talk about MSN Search
Andy Edmonds, lead program manager, and Erik Selberg are two of the geeks who work on making MSN Search better. They talk about how the engine works, and what they’re doing to beat the competition
vs.
Andy Edmonds and Erik Selberg - Frank talk about MSN Search
Andy Edmonds, lead program manager, and Erik Selberg are two of the geeks who work on making MSN Search better. They talk about how the engine works, and what they’re doing to beat the competition
Certainly, these aren’t direct screencaps, but you can see the difference in the title. Personally, I’ve never been that much of a fan of the entire MSN look myself, and I’m happy we’re moving away from it. In particular, I just don’t like a dark background with light text motif, and MSN has been fond of that for some time. I find that text gets lost — and the text we had were the different verticles, such as “News” and “Images.” Then again, at least we no longer have a 9 character search box — there was a winner. But hey, the new “silver” look is an improvement. Frankly, I think weve got a bit to go — the navigation still isn’t where I’d like to see it. The search box gets lost, and the verticles are still not obvious. But we’re getting there… and I suspect you’ll all be happy when we really release Live.
