Live Search: Search engine TO THE EXTREME!

CNN: MSN Live Search

Now let's face it Google is nice and all, but there's certainly room for improvement. Microsoft hopes to unseat the current search king with their launch of Live Search.

I'm all for competition and I see some good things coming from this. Not everything is great though, and I for one wouldn't go quite so far as Yusuf Mehdi who was cited:

Once people get a feel for Windows Live Search, Mehdi said, "They're going to say, 'Holy cow, I had no idea that search could get this much better!"'

At that point I'll be waiting for the truly over the top press releases like:
"The New Windows W00t OS is so fucking amazing, you'll be like 'OMFG WTF I had no idea boot time could BE so amazing'. And then you'll want to blow me for free for letting you in on the secret."

The automatic scrolling feature is interesting though sometimes I thought it was a little twitchy. And the adjustable preview slider was nice, however it isn't labeled very well and I think the bulk of users aren't going to really make use of it.

The image searching was a more pleasant experience, though I wonder about how much the information is cached server side and how content updates may lead to "oops" moments. Overall I've liked what I've seen and hopefully will put the two search engines head to head.