Windows Live Search Improvements

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Last week, some improvements to Windows Live Search were announced which will improve the efficiency of how Live Search crawls and indexes a web site. The main improvements are:

There are some other improvements as well, which also caused the user agent to change. The new user agent is “msnbot/1.1”.

While these improvements are important and definitely needed, the frequency of searches needs to be improved dramatically. The last time I checked there was a pretty good lag time (days to weeks) between the time I posted a new blog entry and the time the Live Search crawlers picked it up. On the contrary, the Google crawlers would pick up that same entry in the matter of a few hours.

I think until the frequency of crawls is improved to match or pass that of Google, Live Search isn’t going to be a strong competitor. People using search sites expect the content to not only be relevant to their search terms but to also contain up-to-date results. Right now Google does a much better job at this than Live Search, although the Live Search interface is much easier to use.

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