Well MSN is up to it again – trying to re-invent the wheel so to speak.

Soon after the launch of their search engine, or soon after taking it out of Beta testing, MSN has released a new search product that is in Beta testing. This search product is called Windows Live Search and can be found at search.live.com.

If you drop the search part of that URL and go straight to live.com the site look s like MSN is trying to break into the Web Portal business. Should Yahoo be nervous? I doubt it.

Any way, back to Windows Live Search report. From my perspective this new product looks pretty good although I have heard tell that it isn’t FireFox friendly. That’s OK by me because neither am I!

I like the fact that you can just keep scrolling through the results as opposed to clicking to the next page. Another interesting thing is the slider bar at the top right of the search page that allows one to select the layout of the search results.

Naturally, seeing as this is a Beta version of the product it doesn’t quite work 100% of the time but that can be forgiven. I tried the image search function but it always seemed to hang and being an Internet kind of person, I lost patience and soon moved on.

I can’t say whether or not this is going to become the new trend in search engine layouts but at this time I say I have to like it. I give it 3 out 5 crawls