Coming soon: Windows Live Search now inside Windows Live Messenger

Very soon, we will release a feature of Windows Live Search built into Windows Live Messenger that we think will help you while chatting with your friends. Tell us what you think! You can try this new Search feature from the activities menu of conversation window, it includes our three most popular scoped search features – Web, News and Images. These scoped results are based on Windows Live Search, so you get the same results as if you were searching on live.com.

Have you ever been chatting with a friend, decided to see a movie together, but had to open up a new browser window to see what time the movie was? Now, life is easy. You can preview a result within Messenger and send the result link to your friend by clicking one button.

For image search result, you can drag/drop it to set it as your conversation window background or your Display picture, or even send this image to your friend.

We use Atlas framework (Microsoft AJAX technology) to build up this feature, which makes our UI more smooth and comfortable. Since we use asynchronous call to get the search results from backend web service, we can render our page layout dynamically. That’s why user won’t feel any page refresh while loading the results. Best of all, the user can preview the first result while other results are still loading their content.

       In our future release, more exciting features are planned. When a new search scope is launched for live.com, it will be automatically available for our Messenger users.

 

If you have more feedback than you want to give in the comment section of this blog, please go to the links below….

 

  For web, this link

For news, this link

For image, this link

We are reading every piece of feedback we receive and will response to comments as soon as we can. So if you have any comments or feature suggestions just post below or use the feedback link

 

— Joseph Yao, Program Manager

On behalf of the Search Pane team

 


Betsynote: 5:40 pm June 20 – we had to edit this post after submitting because, well, we jumped the gun in our excitement. When the feature is properly live, we will confirm it is live on the blog…but in the meantime, be watching for it.

Betsynote: 10:12 AM June 22 – reformatted the links so users have an easier time. Let me know what you think.