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Microsoft has come out with an update to its Live Search home page and has got a pretty positive response in return. And why wouldn’t it? We are accustomed to seeing the same Microsoft outlook at every web page the giant has. The use of scenic beauty as a background image might just tick but then is this how the search market operates?

The background is tipped in to change more often and have ‘hotspots’; interactive areas that highlight parts of images that help you explore search results with respect to the highlighted area. The concept makes it pretty interesting to begin a search with but does that do much to the overall search experience?

The problem that I see here is that when you hover across the image it pops out with information (a bit) and a link that takes you to more results related to that info you have been provided. Why would you do that? If I need to search what animals I need to find on my safari to Botswana wouldn’t I simply search it out myself? Or is it about publicity of a partner site? As it’s said on the blog:

We think the new design is a great start, but there’s more to come, with lots of interesting directions that we’ll be exploring in our next releases of the home page.

Now am I going too far at this or does ‘interesting directions’ really points in at having bits of information to pop out on the image and allure the user to visit those pages? To me, that’s distracting the user away from the cause why one visits the Live Search and then you have the results page. If you are planning to be so ‘interactive and creative’ why keep the result page so dull? It’s pretty confusing for me at least and then we have another claim they put up;

We think hotspots will help users discover parts of Live Search they might not know while not distracting from the core purpose of the page — searching.

Why in the world would someone want to ‘discover’ parts of Live Search for any reason unless one has a lot of time to loiter away from the task of searching a piece of information? Microsoft knows best and all we can do is wait and see.