I just visited the MSN Mobile homepage and saw two new items in the menu, Windows Live Mail Beta and Windows Live Search Beta. I did a web search and it turns out that they aren't really that new having been out for over a month, but they seem to have been more or less ignored so far. The Microsoft Live Mobile team has a blog (NOT Firefox friendly) called Mobile access everywhere! which seems to be the best source of information about these new services.
I'm in the process of reviewing and comparing the various mobile web based email services (the Gmail Mobile review is up) . I'll review Live Mail soon - it's got some nice features but as an evolutionary step from Hotmail Mobile it's got a lower priority for me. Live Search is very innovative so I want to write about it first.
When you launch Live Search you initially see a screen labeled Local Search which is pretty much the same as the Local Search Beta I reviewed in The Web’s Big 3 Do Mobile in November. You can search by keyword plus zip code or address and get a list of hits, selecting a hit returns a map and a link to driving directions. Browser detection is used to vary the map's size from 110 x 110 to 217 x 217 px depending on phone capabilities. 
There have been some minor UI tweaks to Local Search since I last looked at it; the map has been moved up to a more prominent location as has the WTAI-enabled phone number making it easier to find or call the businesses that the search has returned. In short, it's a competent mobile local search but not much different than Google's or Yahoo's entries in this category.
The cool new part of Live Search only appears if you scroll to the bottom of the Local Search screen (or press 4 on your phone's keypad), that's where you will find Web Search. At first glance it's similar to Google and AOL's mobile searches in that it searches the full web. When you open a search hit you are served a transcoded version of the original site, optimized for display on a mobile device. What's different from AOL and Google is the way the site is reformatted and presented. Google collapses what it algorithmically
considers to be the less important parts of a site, replacing them with a plus (+) sign, which when clicked, expands the collapsed part. Microsoft collapses almost everything. This entry on the MS Mobile blog gives a good description of how it works. The design seems based on the work of Microsoft (and Xerox PARC) researcher Patrick Baudisch. See his research paper; Summary Thumbnails: Readable Overviews for Small Screen Web Browsers (pdf). I found it very interesting, profusely illustrated and eminently readable.
My understanding of the the way Live's transcoding works, based on reading Baudish's paper and the blog item and playing with the site is: a full web site is retrieved and broken into small sections (Baudish calls them thumbnails, for Live, Microsoft is referring to them as panels) about the size of a single mobile screen. Logic in the Web service collapses all the panels except the one which is determined to most closely match the search string you entered. Collapsed panels 
are displayed as a line or two of text preceded by a plus (+) sign. Clicking the plus sign opens that panel and collapses the one that was previously open. You can see how it works in the six images at the top left. The first image shows the MSN Mobile homepage with the new links to Live Mail and Live Search. In the second image, I've already done a search for "Google acquires Reqwireless" and opened the first search hit which points to this blog. Live brought up the page with the panel containing the last paragraph expanded. This is not quite what I'd expect. It would make sense if the open panel was one containing the search string or the one containing beginning of the post, but guess the algorithm needs a little tweaking - it is a beta, after all. In the third image, I've simulated how I think it should work by scrolling up to and opening the panel containing the the beginning of the post. For the fourth image I've scrolled to the bottom of the same panel - notice the closed panels below the text. Next, I open the next panel, the one labeled "[+] has acquired Waterloo, Ontario". The results are shown in the fifth image. I like the way it works, I can quickly find the part of the page I'm interested in.
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posted by Dennis Bournique
January 14, 2006 @ 9:02 am
7 View Comments
