I was trying to be really skeptical but it didn't work. But I went into it blind. I have not read any blogs today so I haven't seen what others have said yet. Just fiddling around with the functionality of www.live.com has me impressed. They are really leveraging Ajax in here and there is functionality that we have only begun to expect from a web application. Such as the slider bar that automatically changes the amount of detail in he search results or changes the size of images on the images page. I like retaining my search from one tab to the next - everything, news, images. Not surprisingly, it is reminiscent of how the Windows Desktop Search works - all, just emails, just docs, etc.
My first search was my town -Huntington, Vermont. And I was surprised at how much it found, even in images so quickly. But what really got me was that I haven't looked at the Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local) map lately for my little place in the world. Last year there was no detail for my area. Now I can identify my house, the trails, everything. Luckily you can't see the treasures my newfies leave in the yard for us to scoop up.
Some minor things. It didn't know which of he map searches to put my search into and stuck it in the businesses box, not the address box. But the bigger issue was that I had arrived at the “local“ page via the tabs on live.com. However local is outside of live.com so I couldn't go back to the rest of the site readily. But hey, it's a beta.
One thing that made me laugh is it's ability to identify my location via my i.p. and give me local weather when I first visited the page. Now I know how that works. But a few years ago I didn't and was astonished when I visited Dare Obasanjo's website and it had something like “Welcome to browsers from Vermont“ on it. I emailed him and asked “hey, how'd you know?“. I'm sure he rolled his eyes at what a luddite I was, but politely emailed me back and introduced me to the locator technology. Dare is now part of MSN Spaces and Windows Live team.
I only really played with it for 5 minutes, but I think they're on to something. I'm not keen on the whole listings thing at all and that will take some wooing and boy is that beta site something I ran away from very fast. Make the music go away. Make the whole thing mean something.