With the launch of the new browse experience for News (http://news.live.com/), we now bring you the most relevant stories of the day bucketed in categories, such as top stories, local news, and business. At the same time, the news team has revamped the news results page to incorporate many new features to improve your search experience. Add us to your homepage, try it out, and give us your feedback!
To highlight some of the features of our browse experience:
- Aggregated news We now pull in up-to-date news headlines for users to browse, which include top stories and category-specific articles. Breaking news is clearly identified and up to the minute when it happens, so you’re always at the forefront of developing stories.
- Local news Right off the bat we introduce news from your (U.S.) state.
- Multimedia We incorporate a bevy of multimedia content into our pages, including images and videos with smart-motion thumbnails. Read the headlines, and watch videos all on one page!
We’re trying hard to make our browse page a one-stop shop for local, national, and international news, combined with rich multimedia content.
If you click “more on this story” or type a search into the search box, you’ll notice several new features on the results page:
- Filtering You’re now able to filter the results based on your location to get articles from a local perspective, or you can filter by the dominant categories of your search based on the results — so it’s easy now to get articles from ESPN or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for your Seattle Supersonics queries.
- Related searches We offer suggestions on similar topics.
- Sort articles by date
- Videos When they are available you get videos directly in the results. We love videos around here.
Try out a few searches, like Iraq, obama, microsoft, and let us know what you think!
More to come We’re excited to jumpstart News with these new features, and we have a lot more planned in the coming months. We’ll be pushing out RSS support soon, and for those who’ve noticed that we don’t have blogs in our sources yet, rest assured — we’re getting to them. Our goal is to ensure that we have as many sources as possible in our news search, and we’ll continue to innovate and experiment to make sure we have the right feature set to enable that. In the meantime, have fun with our new News experience, and send feedback our way!
Update Our official URL is http://news.live.com/, but you’ll soon be able to hit our news browse page from the Live Search homepage (http://www.live.com/). To get there, you’ll be able to click the News tab or click the News link on any search results page with an empty query. The new features from News are currently only available to the U.S. market, but we’re working on extending our coverage internationally. Until then, if you live outside the U.S. you can still check us out by clicking here.
The News Search team